the difference is that no SCOTUS member is opening inquiries in processes where they are the prosecutor, victim, and judge at the same time. Fun fact: Brazil's Supreme Court can legally do that _if a crime occurs in the Court's dependencies_... well, they ruled that as the Court has Internet, and people are hurting their honor there... then it is as if the crime occurred inside the Court
It’s arguably lawful. By the Brazilian Constitution, investigation on crimes committed against the Supreme Court are to be presided and supervised by the court itself. Furthermore, it’s been established that the whatever case comes out of the investigation will be sent to the Attorney General. It’s up to him follow prosecution. So no, they’re not the inquirer and the judge.
Questioning procedures is a healthy part of the democratic game. But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s evidence that crimes we’re committed, and legal action is being taken.
I did read the article before commenting. A judge is employed by the Government, it's his or her job to uphold the law, making decisions that aren't in the bests interests of an entity or themselves. The judge in this case is obviously upholding Brazils backwards law when it comes to censorship and free speech. Quite to the contrary, Brazil and the US have far from identical judicial systems.
If you have the money in Brazil you can get anyone into trouble who has offended you where-as in the US and other places it's not as easy because the US judicial system fortunately for you and others is not nearly as corrupt.
The great court isn't even made up of actual judges, by the way.
In Brazil, actual judges are selected by rigorous testing of law knowledge in a process known as concurso which roughly means contest. It's extremely competitive, applicants tend to be disciplined people who study many hours every day. People generally don't make it to a judge position without knowing their shit.
Supreme court judges aren't like that. They're just people appointed by politicians. The censorship-friendly judge who's ordering words into Telegram's mouth? He used to be the lawyer of one of Brazil's biggest drug trafficking gangs, PCC. Incidentally, that criminal organization supported the current president in last year's elections and was involved in a plot to torture and assassinate the judge who imprisoned him for corruption earlier this year. Supreme court ordered most of them released while many Brasília protesters are locked up to this day. It's surreal.
That's rich coming from judges who engaged in blatantly unconstitutional political censorship. They're the guys whose literal job is to apply our constitution but ironically they're the least qualified to do it.
Not only are they not morally qualified, they are also not technically qualified. In Brazil, judges are minted by competition, they are tested via a process known as concurso público which roughly translates as public contest. Law professionals study hard, take the tests and the best are selected to become judges. Essentially, every qualified lawyer wants these well paid positions and they compete for them. Not these supreme court guys though. They're essentially randoms, appointed to the court by the president. In Brazil, the real judges are subordinate to these political appointees. So completely backwards even laymen can see the discrepancy, they even have a saying for it: in Brazil, the utility pole pisses on the dog.
The guy this article is talking about? He went to public events to brag about how he personally abused his supreme court powers to defeat Bolsonaro. It's just incredible to see all this play out in real time.
If it was not for the judicial branch, the internet would, as we know it today, would not exist.
Remember such detestations as the Child Online Protection Act? Which, after being struck down, and the Supreme Court agreeing with the ruling, a John Ashcroft led Department of Justice continued to use tax payer money to push back through the courts?
I suspect that the differences between functional and dysfunctional governments, elected or not, lie largely in their legal and court systems.
Some may not appreciate the depth of the issue, others may simply recognize that there's little that can be done. Common law courts already have relatively strong procedural protections. In some countries like the U.S. these procedural protections are at least in principal inviolable by the legislature, even when they're not explicit in the written constitution.
But courts neither have the duty nor the capacity (legally or otherwise) to police everything that occurs outside their court. If the evidence presented is proper on its face, what else can they do? Judges have an independent duty to pursue the truth of the substantive legal matter, but that's distinct from actively ferreting out ancillary illegality and falsehoods.
We also have an adversarial system, so there are alternatives to direct judicial oversight of the executive branch: the legislature and the defendant. Indeed, much of the evidence for illegal surveillance has come from defendants, sometimes relying on the court's subpoena powers to discover, which is a form of procedural protection. So not only are there strong procedural protections, there's someone in the court room with the duty, the motivation, and at least in principle the power to see that they're enforced.
IMO, it's right and proper for courts to be sources of legal change, just don't expect it to be swift or comprehensive. The upshot is that when it does happen, it's often far more considered and secure. And this is precisely because it's slow, incremental, supported by well-vetted evidence, and spurred by manifest, not conjectured, injustice and suffering.
The fact that courts only react to injustice, rather than prevent it, is something of a feature, not a bug.
The fact that it's the poor that suffer injustice the most isn't something that courts can fix. Look at the right for counsel to be afforded the indigent[1]: how successful was that remedy? Not particularly so as in many places it's not only useless but used to excuse bad outcomes--"well, he did have an attorney". In jurisdictions where it works well it would have, if it hadn't already, been provided. Wealth inequality is particularly far outside the court's wheelhouse.
[1] The traditional right to counsel is merely a right to hire legal representation. The right to publicly funded counsel for the indigent is a prospective remedy required by SCOTUS in 1963. Prospective remedies have poor track records. The good protections, the ones that make up traditional procedural protections, exhibit survival bias and have slowly accreted over nearly a millennia. This is why the Common Law is considered to have the strongest procedural protections--the length of time it's had to refine that aspect of the legal system. Most other Western systems were re-invented de novo in the late 18th and 19th centuries by, basically, philosophers and revolutionaries. Theory only gets you so far, and often takes you way off course.
We have multiple Ministers of Justice and multiple level courts on Brazil , so an higher court can block lower court decisions, even more when that is still been processed.
Oh that's just extremely not true. Open, non-secret courts are incredibly important for avoiding impropriety. Especially in a common law system, there's just no way that would work.
If it's secret, it's not a real court. Even the founding fathers of the USA would disagree and they're kinda still fresh history-wise in terms of justice systems around the world.
reply