The order given on Tuesday (26) by the minister of the (Supreme Federal Court), for the Federal District Penal Police to the house of is a measure that seeks to prevent the former president from entering a car of any embassy or consulate and requires diplomatic asylum.
The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations says in its article 22 that “the means of transport” of diplomatic missions “may not be the subject of search, request, embargo or measure of execution”. Thus, the former president could cause an international incident if they were collected at home by any vehicle identified with a consular service plate, the old blue plate.
It prohibits the former president not only to leave his home but also to maintain contact with foreign authorities, wherever. She says nothing, however, about a consular vehicle driven by any employee enter the garage and leave with the doors and glass closed, without satisfying anyone.
The most likely destinations of such an action would be Hungary, Argentina and the US, as in the direction of the asylum.
The Hungarian Embassy in Brasilia housed the former president for two nights, between February 12 and 14, 2024, shortly after the Federal Police seized his passport, fulfilling order from Moraes. In practice, the two days spent at the Hungarian embassy corresponded to the granting of a temporary diplomatic asylum, because, there, it was unreachable, under Vienna’s conventions, if an arrest order was issued.
More recently, the Federal Police discovered on Bolsonaro’s cell phone the draft of a letter of February 10, 2024, addressed to the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, with asylum request to the neighboring country. As far as it is known, the letter was never sent, but its mere existence reinforces the certainty that the asylum alternative was on the rise in the days following the apprehension of the passport. Finally, the US appears as the third asylum option, given the recent positions of US President Donald Trump.
The search for asylum from boarding a diplomatic vehicle would not be free of controversy. The first of these concerns the misuse of consular protection by a foreign government that seeks to impose on matters of Brazilian internal policy.
Diplomatic immunity only applies to actions that are typical of the duties inherent to diplomacy, and the Brazilian State could claim that the granting of asylum to Bolsonaro violates Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that the right to asylum cannot “be invoked in the case of a process actually existing for a crime of common law.” Therefore, to invoke international protection to it would be to pervert international documents for merely political purposes.
In addition, although police cannot take a diplomatic asylum from inside a vehicle protected by their consular prerogatives, nothing would prevent road blocks from containing the vehicle, creating a long -term international impasse and unpredictable consequences.
In 2012, Brazil starred in similar situation when he housed 454 days in his embassy in La Paz the opponent Roger Molina Pinto. As the government of then-President Evo Morales did not safe conduct so that he could leave the country as sailed, a Brazilian diplomat named Eduardo Saboia took the initiative to put it hidden inside a car from the embassy, traveling with it for 22 hours, to the border with Brazil.
As the car was not detected and intercepted, it was not necessary to discuss the prerogatives of legal protection to the car, but the episode is illustrative of the unlikely paths that these situations can take, which explains the decision made by Moraes to place the police around Bolsonaro’s house for 24 hours a day until the sentence is issued.
