BRAZIL’S SUPREME COURT is an ideological court

ALL GENERAL VOTING MATTERS OF THE BRAZILIAN SUPREME COURT HAVE IDEOLOGICAL INCLINATIONS

Cloves Rodrigues, Saturday, April 25, 2025

The Supreme Federal Court should be the guardian of the Constitution, but recent decisions show that the Court has assumed the role of a political protagonist, moving away from its original function. An analysis of judgments with general repercussions reveals an action permeated by ideological bias, transforming the STF into an actor that legislates and reinterprets constitutional principles according to political and social preferences.

In the judgment on the subsidiary liability of the Public Administration (Topic 246), the Supreme Court changed the classic logic of the burden of proof, imposing on the administration the responsibility for possible labor defaults by third parties. Instead of guaranteeing the objective application of the law, the decision favored an ideological narrative of automatic protection for workers, compromising the principle of legality and imposing legal risks on the State.

Another example is the decision that considered the execution of environmental damages to be imprescriptible, even if converted into losses and damages. By removing legal certainty and creating a perpetual obligation, the STF abandoned the balance between environmental protection and the stability of civil relations, adhering to a radical environmentalist vision that transforms the defense of nature into a justification for suppressing fundamental rights of prescription.

The ideological tendency also appears in the decision that considered evidence obtained during intimate searches of prison visitors to be illicit. By privileging individual dignity in an absolute way, the Supreme Court disregarded the critical context of the Brazilian prison system, weakening public safety in the name of an idealized vision of human rights, dissociated from reality.

In the military field, the Court declared the controversy over the endorsement of time served in the Armed Forces for promotion in state careers to be infraconstitutional, failing to protect rights that involve federative competences. The decision reveals contempt for the state military structure and for the importance of federative integration provided for in the Constitution.

Finally, in its analysis of the permanence of religious symbols in public bodies, the STF, under the leadership of ministers such as Luís Roberto Barroso, demonstrated a militant secularism, reinterpreting the secularity of the State as an attack on traditional symbols of the Christian faith in public spaces, even though the Constitution guarantees religious and cultural freedom.

These cases expose a Supreme Court that, instead of being the fulcrum of the constitutional scales, has become an ideological court, driven by specific political and social agendas. It is urgent to rescue the technical function of the STF so that it can once again be a moderating power and not a protagonist in ideological disputes that should be resolved in Parliament.