The Highest Court Has Become a Joke
By Hotspotnews
The substance of Mendes’s complaint can be examined on its own terms. He argues that conversations mentioning Paulo Gonet contained nothing illicit, that the relator later admitted as much in plenary, and that lifting secrecy anyway inflicted reputational damage that no later correction can undo. He further claims the timing, near September 7, and a subsequent video thanking popular support revealed political intent. Those are serious accusations about due process and the weaponization of publicity. They deserved to be made, if they were to be made at all, inside the court, in writing, with the formality the office requires.
Instead they were delivered as a denunciation. The comparison to Lava Jato methods, the charge of selective leaking, the claim that the real target is the right of defense itself: all of this was packaged for maximum public effect. The result is not clarification. It is spectacle. One justice accuses another of turning the court into an electoral instrument while doing so on the platform designed for electoral combat. The contradiction is obvious.
Brazilian magistrates are bound by rules that exist precisely to prevent this. The Organic Law of the Judiciary restricts public commentary that compromises the appearance of impartiality or turns pending matters into political theater. Those rules have been treated as optional for years. The Mendes-Mendonça exchange is only the latest and crudest demonstration. When two members of the highest court treat each other as opponents in a campaign, citizens are entitled to ask who is still judging and who is merely performing.
The damage is institutional, not personal. Every time a minister chooses the register of insult over the register of argument, the court looks less like a tribunal and more like another arena of the same polarized fight that already consumes the rest of public life. People who already distrust the STF receive confirmation. People who still expect it to stand above the fray receive disappointment. Neither outcome strengthens the rule of law.
A court that cannot police its own tone cannot credibly lecture the rest of the country about republican manners. The demand is simple and non-negotiable: the ministers of the Supreme Court must speak as judges or they will be treated as politicians. The current performance is a barraco. It should be treated as one.