The First Panel of the (Supreme Federal Court) formed a majority this Friday (14) to receive the case against (-SP) on the charge of coercion.
The ministers presented their votes on the first day of the trial in the virtual plenary session. Cármen Lúcia has until the 25th to present her position.
At this stage of the process, the ministers analyze whether the complaint from the (Attorney General’s Office) brings minimal signs of authorship and materiality that justify the opening of criminal proceedings against Eduardo. With the confirmation of the result, the former president’s son will become a defendant and will answer to the Supreme Court for the crimes of which he was accused.
In his vote, rapporteur Alexandre de Moraes said that the PGR raised several signs that Eduardo worked in the United States to pressure the Judiciary to suspend the proceedings against his father in the coup plot.
The crime of coercion, to be configured, requires that the action has a serious threat. For the minister, it materialized in “articulation and obtaining sanctions from the government of the United States of America, with the application of export tariffs to Brazil, suspension of visas for entry by several Brazilian authorities in the United States of America and the application of the effects of the Magnitsky Act to this reporting minister”.
“There is relevant evidence that Eduardo Nantes Bolsonaro’s conduct was aimed at creating an institutional and social environment of instability, with the application of increasing sanctions to Brazilian authorities and economic losses to Brazil, as a way of coercing the ministers of the Federal Supreme Court to decide in favor of the defendant Jair Messias Bolsonaro, in total disregard for due legal process”, he added.
Eduardo Bolsonaro and the journalist were accused by the PGR of organizing actions with the government with the aim of intervening in the processes against Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Attorney General Paulo Gonet saw the duo’s action as a crime of coercion, which consists of “using violence or serious threats, with the aim of favoring one’s own interest or that of others, against authority, party, or any other person who works or is called upon to intervene in judicial proceedings”.
The case against the two ended up being disbanded. Moraes ordered that Eduardo be summoned by notice, on the grounds that he was hindering the progress of the process; Figueiredo has lived in the United States for more than ten years and will be notified personally, through international legal cooperation.
The PGR’s indictment says that Eduardo and Figueiredo, since receiving the complaint against Bolsonaro at the Supreme Court, began to articulate successive and continued actions to intervene in the criminal process.
“The purpose was to free Jair Bolsonaro, and also Paulo Figueiredo himself, from criminal conviction for the crimes that led to the opening of criminal proceedings”, stated the attorney general, Paulo Gonet in the coercion complaint. “The threats were reiterated several times, on different occasions,” he added.
The prosecutor claims that Eduardo and Figueiredo tried to exploit the relationship they maintain with members of the American government and the president’s advisors and advisors and that they used this network of contacts to constrain the Supreme Court’s actions.
They induced, says the accusatory piece, “the adoption of retaliatory measures by the North American government against Brazil and against Brazilian authorities, with the aim of compelling the Supreme Court to close the cases without convictions, especially against Jair Bolsonaro.”
This pressure also had the objective of getting the National Congress to approve an amnesty project that covered Bolsonaro, says Gonet.
“Those accused threatened the judicial authorities and other Powers with the promise that they would obtain sanctions from North American authorities willing to hinder and ruin their civil lives, even in Brazil, if the criminal process did not have the outcome they wanted or if the amnesty —necessarily extended and primarily to Jair Bolsonaro— was not guided and achieved in the National Congress.”
One of the practical effects of Eduardo and Figueiredo’s actions in the United States was the application, by the American government, against Minister Alexandre de Moraes and his wife.
In a joint statement released after the complaint, the duo said that the accusation revealed the “ongoing political persecution”. They still say that the accusation is “fake” and call Paulo Gonet’s team at the PGR “Moraes’ lackeys”.
Public defender Antonio Ezequiel Inácio Barbosa, responsible for the case, asks the Supreme Court that the coercion charge not be brought forward because the criminal type requires violence or serious threat to be constituted.
“Statements about political facts, even if critical, acidic or blunt, do not constitute violence or a serious threat. Specifically, the latter presupposes a promise of future evil that depends on the will and power of the person threatening. If the agent does not have the power to carry out the announced evil, there is no serious threat, but a mere opinion or prognosis about future events”, he states.
