For our daily lives, there are certainly more important laws than others. Among them, it is undeniably one of the most essential for any Brazilian’s life: everything, from birth to the death of a person, going through professional and business life, marriage and family relationships is there. Moreover, even other matters not directly referred to in the code are affected by it, as it is in civil life (the common life of people) that tax law, criminal law, consumer law, the right to, environmental law and many others find several concepts necessary for their application.
Such is the importance of one that there is a specific procedure for this: it is not possible that more than one such project is at the same time in the legislature; Each part of the project needs to be analyzed by a specific thematic committee, whose works later need to be gathered and analyzed by another commission; It cannot be voted on an urgent basis, among others. This is not mere bureaucracy, but guarantees to avoid disasters arising from poorly written, dubious, anachronistic or even opportunistic rules.
Sanctioned in 2002, the current Civil Code resulted from discussions started in 1975 from the draft a commission whose works took place from 1969 to 1975. Due to this long time of proceedings, parts of the text are actually out of date: for example, the rules of coexistence in urban condominiums were written at a time when most of the Brazilian population lived in the rural zone, not existing the current apartments that arrive have more residents than small municipalities. This explains many of the problems of those who live today in a building.
Although the current code is always receiving punctual updates, earlier this year something radical happened: on January 31 it was filed in the PL 04/2025, whose menu informs that it intends to “update” the current Civil Code. This is not true: the result of a jurist commission that worked for 18 months, the project is, in practice, changing 54% of the 2,046 articles, it moves the most structural issues for the life of the Brazilian. To make matters worse, ambiguous texts can back down important social advances, potentially affecting rights already conquered, such as freedom of expression and the press, and creating a “right to oblivion”, already considered incompatible with the constitution for constituting censorship and violation of access to information.
Made “the touch of cash”, the production of the draft occurred with very few public hearings. Even in those performed, there is only records in some of them. In times where public policies are required based on evidence, the reasoning of the project is not even due to the work of explaining article changes by article, who will say present statistics, studies and technical notes or impact analysis. The principles of transparency and publicity sent memories. With all these problems, it is no wonder experts defend their filing.
The problem, however, is deeper: some senators apparently want to approve it quickly to become law as soon as possible. So it doesn’t. We cannot allow such an important and impactful decision to be made in a sugar and irresponsible way, without concern for the inevitably negative effects that the proposed text will cause.
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