The minister of the (Supreme Federal Court) defended, this Monday (11), the legitimacy of individual decisions in the court and the participation of magistrates in hearings and public events.
In an article published in the magazine, he criticized the massive volume of individual decisions made by ministers. According to the minister, without this instrument, there would be an increase in the time taken to judge cases and a general tendency towards a paralysis of Justice.
Dino’s demonstration comes three weeks after he published an article on the portal in defense of a .
The participation of STF ministers in events funded by businesspeople, which are sometimes part of court proceedings, has been the target of criticism in recent years.
In the article, Dino says that listening to different points of view is important and does not involve bias.
“Hearing — at public events or hearings — lawyers, prosecutors, businesspeople, teachers, non-governmental organizations, professional associations, politicians, journalists or religious leaders does not automatically imply corruption or partiality in the exercise of jurisdiction.”
For him, what gets in the way are schemes for illicit enrichment, and not the “sporadic and healthy social coexistence between people from different segments”. Acts of improbity, which he calls “abject”, occur outside the public sphere, with “hidden payments and in clandestine meetings, which will never appear on a bank statement or in an official agenda”.
“Wrong diagnoses often lead to inept arguments and ineffective or disastrous therapies, while the real problems continue to circulate like elegant blue elephants, without being noticed or bothered”, concludes the judge. He mentioned blue elephants recently in reference to an alleged omission by authorities in the Banco Master scandal.
In relation to monocratic decisions, the minister recognizes in the article that there is “a much greater number of monocratic judicial acts”, but attributes the pattern to the “constitutional and legal model adopted by Brazil”.
According to data released by the minister, president of the Supreme Court, in 2025, the court produced 116,170 decisions, of which 93,559 were individual and 22,611 were collective — a ratio of around 80.5% to 19.5%.
When dealing with the topic, Dino first cites the Civil Procedure Code. The code provides for the power of the judge to conduct the process, make decisions on a provisional basis and deny action to appeals that contradict consolidated jurisprudence. In the same sense, it mentions the Criminal Procedure Code.
According to him, the problem is that, if these and other laws were repealed, there would be no conditions for the collegiate bodies to assume this responsibility. It would be necessary for the number of cases judged by the collegiate bodies to be multiplied dozens of times to support the flow.
In this sense, according to Dino, “contrary to what some seem to imagine, the monocratic decisions in the STF do not derive from a supposed ‘authoritarian tendency’ or from the personalism of judges. Rather, they are an expression of legal rules without which, at the present moment, a jurisdictional collapse would occur in Brazil.”
“More slowness means less access to justice”, says the minister. “After all, no one enters Justice to remain there forever, rolling stones up the mountain, like Sisyphus.”
Furthermore, the judge says that 97% of monocratic decisions last year were confirmed by the collegiate bodies after appeal, which would indicate, in his view, that the majority of these measures reflect the court’s vision, and not just the personal will of the judge.
