The (National Council of Justice), the body responsible for overseeing the judiciary, inflated its board of auxiliary judges in recent years and paid R $ 3.4 million in penduricals in the first five months of 2025.
Assistants are magistrates requested from other courts to act in the CNJ. The income paid by the Council accumulates with those they receive in the organs of origin – which sometimes already, already, of R $ 46,366.
The R $ 3.4 million paid this year by the CNJ benefited 50 auxiliary judges who currently work or had some passage through the agency in 2025. The data were extracted from the Council’s transparency system.
In a statement, the CNJ states that it has “consolidated its constitutional role as a coordination body, strategic planning, implementation of judicial policies, as well as its correctional attribution”, and that it has the lowest budget of the judiciary.
The number of auxiliary judges of the agency was seven in early 2017 and reached 47 in the first half of 2025, according to CNJ documents. Fluctuations in this quantity are common. There were new changes in the tables after the first half of 2025 and currently there are 43 of these professionals on the board.
From 2017 to 2025, the CNJ had five different presidents: Carmen Lúcia (2016-2018), Dias Toffoli (2018-2020), Luiz Fux (2020-2022), Rosa Weber (2022-2023) and Luís Roberto Barroso (since 2023). The presidency of the Council is always held by the acting president at the Supreme Court (STF).
Auxiliary judges are requested by the presidency of the CNJ or the National Court of Justice, which is also part of the Council, and are allocated in various functions. They receive an extra amount if they earn from the court of origin a base salary less than R $ 44,048.
The rules determine that judges from outside Brasilia receive daily to work in the federal capital. There are also indemnities and other eventual gains. These income do not count on the ceiling of functionalism.
The highest amount paid by the CNJ in a single month to an auxiliary judge in the period was for Claudia Catafesta, who works at the National Court of Justice.
She received $ 98,842 from the agency in April this year. There were R $ 12,721 in daily rates and R $ 86,121 in “net income”, according to the paycheck available on the board’s website.
Of this total, R $ 82,129 are “indemnities”. In the same month, Catafesta had a net income of R $ 94,446 of the Paraná Court of Justice, to which it is linked.
The second largest monthly income was the assistant judge Luis Geraldo Sant’Ana Lanfredi. He received R $ 56,819 from the CNJ in January this year, being R $ 44,768 in daily and R $ 12,051 in net income.
The daily rate was higher than normal because it covered expenses for a trip to Portugal to represent the CNJ. Responsible for the agency sector that oversees the prison system, Lanfredi participated in an entourage to know the Portuguese model of care for drug users.
In the same month that he received these CNJ amounts, he had another R $ 134,358, in addition to R $ 10,000 in daily rates, paid by the Court of São Paulo.
The CNJ did not explain why these two auxiliary judges had income from this dimension. The report sought Catafesta and Lanfredi, but received no response.
The advice. The values went from up to 6.5 daily from R $ 700 per month to up to ten of R $ 1,055 per month.
The penduricals paid by the judiciary and the prosecutor have been the subject of debate in the discussion of projects on supersalaries. STF President Luís Roberto Barroso said in Ao Sheet which is favorable to limit compensation, but with caveats.
“I am in favor of Congress to say which funds can exceed the ceiling legitimately and end the hangers that are unduly given,” he said.
The latest CNJ audit report, with information on 2024, points out failures in the granting of daily. The document analyzes a period prior to the survey made by the report.
The audit pointed out situations such as the same request that motivated the payment of daily for work performed in different months, daily related to holidays and weekends without justification and duplication of daily payment made by the CNJ and the court of origin.
The report also mentions the “improper payment of daily rates to magistrates and counselors domiciled in the Federal District”. The document does not say the name of who would have benefited from the irregularity.
The CNJ said in a statement that in 20 years he made only two contests. It also stated that the board activities are only possible because of the reinforcement of requested servers.
“As in all public agencies, of all powers, compensation installments do not integrate the calculation for the purpose of observance of the ceiling [de salários] Constitutional, “says the note.
On daily rates, the agency stated that, as positions are temporary, and judges remain linked to their courts, “no expectation of change of definitive domicile to Brasilia is not justified.” The board stated that the daily paid daily, pointed out in the audit, were returned and has perfected the payment controls.
