The president of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, is preparing a response to a ruling by Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Flávio Dino that struck down an electoral court order concerning posts about Our Lady of Aparecida. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Kassio will meet on Monday (28) with STF President Edson Fachin to warn him about what he sees as improper interference by Supreme Court justices in the electoral court, and to demand institutional measures against manipulation of the system that assigns case rapporteurs, the justices who write the first opinion on each case.
Timeline
On Friday (25), TSE Justice André Mendonça granted a request from the presidential campaign of Flávio Bolsonaro, of the right-wing PL party, and ordered five platforms to remove posts he called "manifestly untrue" that linked the candidate to an alleged plan to strip Our Lady Aparecida, Brazil's Catholic patroness, of her title. On Sunday (27), Dino annulled the injunction and ordered the posts restored. The justice wrote that the posts showed no "degree of certainty of illicitness to draw the harshest consequences against freedom of expression and, ultimately, against religious freedom itself".
The case file that gave Dino jurisdiction has no connection to the presidential race. He ruled on a request by actor Antônio Tabet, one of the profiles hit by Mendonça's order, filed inside a case that had sat in his chambers since May, about the censorship of posts on the ineligibility of former congressman Deltan Dallagnol. According to Folha, Kassio told an associate he saw the move as a violation of the principle of the natural judge: in the TSE president's view, it is as if Tabet's lawyers had bypassed the STF's random assignment lottery and picked the justice who would hear the request, in search of a favorable outcome.
What each side says
Dino struck the injunction down for lack of grounds and proportionality, without ruling on the content of the posts, as Folha's newsletter column reported. Kassio, in turn, considers such maneuvers frequent and plans to ask Fachin for rules to block the practice. The dispute traces back to a rumor in the final stretch of the campaign: BBC News Brasil found that the only bill ever introduced to remove the patroness title was filed in 2007 by then congressman Victório Galli and shelved in 2008, with no record of involvement by Flávio Bolsonaro. The candidate denies the claim and took the matter to the electoral court.
The meeting between Fachin and Kassio had been scheduled since last week, according to Folha, and the TSE president intends to use it to address what he sees as a risk of escalating tensions between the two courts. The next step in the case is the meeting itself, set for Monday (28), one week before the first round of Brazil's elections.