The National Council of Justice () approved this Tuesday (11) a resolution that increases the minimum percentage for public judicial examinations from 20% to 30%. The new rule also includes indigenous people and quilombolas among the beneficiaries and aligns the agency’s internal rules with law No. 15,142/2025, which redefined the quota policy in the federal public service.
The measure will be applied to competitions with two or more vacancies. In addition to the expansion, the resolution establishes the mandatory hetero-identification procedure and specific criteria for confirming the self-declaration of indigenous people and quilombolas.
The text defines that 25% of the vacancies will be allocated to black and brown people, 3% to indigenous people and 2% to quilombolas, totaling 30% reservation. There is also the possibility of specific notices distributing up to 10% of vacancies between indigenous people and quilombolas in different ways, respecting a minimum of 20% for black and brown people. The information was shared by the CNJ to Sheet. The normative act had not yet been made available until the publication of this text.
The norm must provide for redistribution rules: if there are not enough candidates in one of the groups, the vacancies are successively reverted to the others — first among indigenous people and quilombolas, then to blacks and browns and, finally, to broad competition.
A Sheet showed in 2023 that, until then, the state judicial exams had been effectively filled. In the Federal Court, the number of judges approved per quota was non-existent.
For sociologist Márcio José de Macedo, professor and diversity coordinator at FGV EAESP, the change is positive, but it should not, alone, change the composition of the Judiciary.
“In general, just establishing a quota policy does not guarantee that it will be successful,” he states. Competition for the judiciary is high, and preparation for the exams has high costs, which limits access for black, indigenous and quilombola people, according to the professor.
“The universe of the judiciary is still quite homogeneous in terms of class, race and gender origins. The majority of judges, prosecutors and judges are made up of white men from the middle and upper classes of Brazilian society”, he says.
For Macedo, the effect of this is that many candidates from historically marginalized groups intuitively do not identify this career as a possibility and exclude themselves from competitions even with the offer to reserve places.
He states that the reservation of places is necessary, but it only works with institutional involvement in identifying and overcoming their own structural inequalities.
The counselor of the National Council of the Public Ministry (CNMP) Karen Luise de Souza, who was previously an assistant judge to the presidency of the CNJ, presented this same Tuesday a similar proposal, to increase the minimum reserve in Public Ministry competitions to 30% — 25% for black people (black and brown), 3% for indigenous people and 2% for quilombolas.
“We hope to include more indigenous and quilombola people and make clear the Public Prosecutor’s Office project that we intend to adopt: plural, diverse and a mirror of society”, he states.
The competitions, in addition to registration, involve travel and accommodation for candidates during the selection process. These expenses, he says, often make it impossible for those who come from less favored social contexts to participate. Therefore, scholarship programs are essential so that these candidates can compete on equal terms.
“There is a very large distance between the institution and the real country”, he states.
