A Necessary Counterattack: Nikolas Ferreira’s PEC to Restore Accountability to Brazil’s Supreme Court
By Hotspotnews
For years, Brazilians who believe in constitutional balance have watched with growing alarm as the Supreme Federal Court (STF) has steadily expanded its own power while shrinking the checks that the 1988 Constitution placed upon it. The latest and most brazen example came this week when Justice Gilmar Mendes, sitting alone, issued a provisional ruling that effectively stripped citizens and the Senate of their historic right to initiate impeachment proceedings against ministers of the Court itself for crimes of responsibility.
With a stroke of the pen, Mendes rewrote decades of precedent and the plain text of the 1950 Impeachment Law. From now on, he decreed, only the Attorney General (PGR) may file such complaints. Ordinary citizens are silenced. The Senate’s internal rules are subjected to prior judicial approval. The quorum for conviction was quietly raised from three-fifths to two-thirds. In short, the Court declared itself practically untouchable.
This is not judicial restraint; it is judicial supremacy dressed up as protection of “institutional stability.”
Enter federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira and a growing bloc of conservative lawmakers. On December 3, 2025, they filed a proposed constitutional amendment (PEC) that would slam the door on this power grab and return impeachment authority to where the Constitution always intended it to reside: the people and their elected representatives in the Senate.
The Ferreira PEC does four critical things:
1. It reaffirms that any Brazilian citizen may present a denunciation against an STF minister for crimes of responsibility—the same right citizens have against the President of the Republic.
2. It obligates the President of the Senate to place any such denunciation on the agenda once it is backed by at least three-fifths of senators (49 out of 81), removing the current practice of indefinite shelving.
3. It lowers the conviction quorum back to three-fifths in the plenary, aligning it with every other impeachment process in the Constitution.
4. Most importantly, it constitutionalizes these rules, placing them beyond the reach of future solitary decisions by individual justices.
This is not “attacking the institutions,” as the usual suspects are already screaming. This is defending the institutions—the real ones, the ones designed by the Constituent Assembly of 1988 that deliberately refused to create an all-powerful judicial caste above democracy.
The Mendes ruling exposed the core problem: when the referees also play on the field and write the rulebook mid-game, the match is rigged. Brazilians have watched the Court suspend elected lawmakers, censor media outlets, freeze social-media platforms, jail people without due process, and now shield its own members from the only constitutional mechanism of accountability that exists. Enough.
Nikolas Ferreira’s PEC is not revenge; it is restoration. It is a reminder that in a constitutional republic, no branch is monarchic, and no public servant—however exalted his robe—stands above the law or the sovereign people who wrote it.
If the Supreme Court wishes to be respected, it must first respect the separation of powers. If it refuses, the National Congress has not only the right but the duty to remind it—by constitutional amendment if necessary—that in Brazil, the people rule, not nine unelected judges.
The fight has just begun, and for the first time in a long while, the side of democratic accountability is on offense.
