Anyone who has ever been involved in a legal process must have heard about judicial deposits. Basically, these deposits are made up of money from people who are disputing an issue in a case and who, to avoid fines and other penalties, deposit it in a bank account in the care of the judge responsible for the case. It serves as a guarantee: the money is blocked until the final decision, when it is released to whoever won the case.
With more than 76 million people in the country, the accumulated values are immense. At the São Paulo Court of Justice (TJ-SP), the largest in the country alone, the stock of judicial deposits reached .
As deposits sit idle for months or years, they earn significant interest. The court chooses a bank to centralize and manage these resources. In exchange for exclusivity over a billion-dollar volume, the bank pays the court a periodic remuneration. In the case of TJ-SP, the contract with . How much each court receives, by which bank, under what conditions and what it uses this money for are questions that citizens do not have an easy answer for today.
The lack of advertising standards is not just a problem for society; It is a problem for the institutional governance of the courts themselves. In January of this year, Metrópoles reported that the judges of the Maranhão Court of Justice discovered that the president of the court had unilaterally transferred R$2.8 billion in judicial deposits from Banco do Brasil to Banco de Brasília (), an institution that was then in the sights of the Federal Police on suspicion of involvement with Banco Master. The decision had not been submitted to the collegiate and ended in a debate.
Another transparency problem concerns the so-called special funds, made up of resources arising from fees charged by the Judiciary and, in some cases, . As it is outside the regular budget, it has more spending flexibility and is used to pay for everything from computers to household items.
Access to information about these funds is a little better, but still far from adequate. With some difficulty, it was possible to identify the following amounts collected in 2025: TJ-SP registered R$8.4 billion; the Court of Justice of Minas Gerais (TJ-MG), R$4.2 billion; the Court of Justice of Rio Grande do Sul (TJ-RS), R$ 2.2 billion; the Court of Justice of Paraná (TJ-PR), R$889 million. We did not find equivalent data from the Court of Justice of (TJ-RJ).
To gather information from just five courts, it was necessary to mine data published in completely different locations and formats on each portal. For a citizen, seeking this type of information, in practice, is unfeasible.
Recently, the National Council of Justice () under the rapporteurship of minister Edson Fachin, who is also president of the Federal Supreme Court, created a centralized system for consulting personnel expenses.
Along the same path, the creation of a unified portal for bank deposit management contracts, the volume of interest generated by the court, the revenues from special funds and the detailed destination of these resources, in standardized and accessible language, would represent a significant advance in the transparency of the Justice system.
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