Brazil’s Supreme Court upholds annulment of prison sentences against Lula

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Brazilian Supreme Court on Thursday ratified the decision adopted by one of its judges, who annulled the sentences handed down in the first instance against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who thus recovers all his political rights.

The decision was taken by eight votes to three and supported the position of Justice Edson Fachin, who on March 8 had annulled the sentences against Lula, which totaled almost 25 years of imprisonment, by means of a precautionary measure, due to a conflict of competence.

Fachin considered that the two trials in which Lula was sentenced to prison, and two others in which there was still no sentence, were irregular since they were carried out in the courts of the city of Curitiba, under the charge of former judge Sergio Moro, who had no jurisdiction over those matters.

The argument of Fachin, an instructor at the Supreme Court of the proceedings related to Operation Car Wash, was that the cases for which Lula was tried had no links to the corruption at state-owned Petrobras and therefore were outside the jurisdiction of Curitiba, limited to cases related to the oil company.

This same Thursday, before the session, Lula told a local radio station that he was “very calm” and “confident” that the Supreme Court would back Fachin’s decision, which annulled the sentences handed down against him but referred the cases that took place in Curitiba to courts in Brasília, where they will have to be retried.

These cases refer to an apartment and a country house that Lula allegedly received as a bribe from companies that, according to the accusation, obtained fraudulent contracts with Petrobras, and to alleged donations that these same companies made to an institute of the former president in a similar context.

Lula, who spent 580 days in prison for these now annulled proceedings, has always proclaimed his innocence and has also appealed in other instances against the jurisdiction of Curitiba.

“For four years we have been defending that the courts in Curitiba could not judge me,” said Lula, who also reiterated that he is not worried about the proceedings being reopened in Brasília.

“I already proved my innocence. I want to see now that someone shows up to prove my guilt,” challenged Lula, who, once the ruling that annulled the Curitiba proceedings is confirmed, fully recovers all his political rights and will be able to run for president in 2022.