Brazil’s Military Court to decide on another request for Alexandre de Moraes’ arrest

Brazil’s Superior Military Court (STM) has received the second request that wants the arrest of the minister and censorship czar Alexandre de Moraes, of the Supreme Court (STF), for “military crimes against the political and social order of Brazil.”

Presented to the STM on Friday, Dec. 16, the lawsuit is authored by lawyer Rafael Freire, who seeks the removal of Moraes from his positions as a judge of the STF and as president of the Superior Electoral Court, as well as his arrest.

The lawyer says he filed the request “given the imminent risk of the illegal and unconstitutional arrest of countless people throughout the country, without due process of law and through abuse of authority.”

The lawsuit is in the cabinet of Minister José Barroso Filho.

Among other arguments, Freire claims that Moraes, as president of the TSE, “obstructed” the military activity of the Armed Forces during the analysis of the transparency commission that analyzed the electronic ballot boxes.

Moraes “impeded the effective inspection and audit, imposing unreasonable obstacles, illegal constraints, and vexatious and humiliating circumstances against the Armed Forces’ technicians, even mocking the command exercised by the Ministry of Defense,” the lawyer noted.

“An example of these illegal constraints was the refusal to make available the source code of the ballot box by the president of the TSE – the most important object of inspection – submitting the cyber command to examine more than 17 million lines of programming, in a restricted environment, with limited time and computer resources of the TSE itself and, in the inspection room, with only a few sheets of ‘paper’ and pen,” said Freire.

According to the lawyer, Moraes preferred the opinions of foreigners, such as outside observers, to the military’s analysis.

“While ignoring and impeding the inspection activities of the Armed Forces provided by law, the president of the TSE accepted the opinions of more than 120 foreign observers, who attest to the reliability of the Brazilian elections’, without any conclusive technical report on the system’s source code,” Freire noted.

FIRST ACTION AGAINST MORAES IN MILITARY COURT

Two weeks ago, former judge Wilson Issao Koressawa filed a criminal suit requesting the preventive detention of minister Alexandre de Moraes. The case is still under analysis by the Court.