The Senate Has No Ethics Body. That Is a Choice.
For more than two years the Federal Senate has operated without a functioning Ethics Council. The last meeting was in July 2024. The last two-year term expired in March 2025. Nineteen representations sit unexamined. New filings against the Senate president himself cannot even receive the five-day preliminary review the Code of Ethics requires. This is not a clerical delay. It is a refusal to perform a core constitutional function.
Responsibility is not mysterious. Party leaders must submit names in proportion to their benches. They have not finished the job. The Senate Presidency must then call the election and install the Council. It has not done so. The previous Council president, Jayme Campos, kept the body dormant for years, treating many complaints as “bobagens.” The current Senate president, Davi Alcolumbre, sits as a titular member of that same Council and now holds the power to reconvene it while several of the pending cases name him. The conflict is structural, not accidental.
The Code of Ethics, Resolution 20 of 1993, is clear. The Mesa is supposed to organize the election of members in February and March of the relevant legislative sessions. The Council president has five business days to accept or archive a properly filed representation. None of those deadlines can be met because the institution itself has been left in a holding pattern labeled “awaiting party indications.”
Self-regulation only works when the regulated have an interest in being regulated. When the same actors control both the agenda and the membership of the disciplinary body, delay becomes the preferred outcome. Historical precedent confirms the pattern: the Senate has cassated only three sitting members in more than three decades. Most cases never leave the first drawer.
The public is asked to accept that an ethics council that does not meet, is not installed, and includes the principal target of current complaints is still performing its duty. It is not. An institution that will not police its own members eventually invites others to do it for them. That is the cost of this prolonged vacancy.
Sources: Constituição Federal, art. 55; Resolução do Senado Federal nº 20/1993; official Senate composition records; contemporaneous reporting on Council inactivity, 2024–2026.
