Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), leaves office today (11), after anticipating his retirement by one month. He turns 75 on May 11, the date on which he would be compulsorily retired.
Lewandowski leaves the cabinet with a collection of 780 processes, which should be inherited by his successor. As of this Tuesday (11), it will be up to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to indicate a new name for the minister’s chair. When he announced his retirement, the minister said he had not nominated Lula.
There is no deadline for the new nomination. Lula leaves this Tuesday for China, from where he returns next Sunday (16). At breakfast with journalists at the beginning of the month, the president said he was “not in a hurry” to make the nomination. “The choice of his replacement [Lewandowski] it will be done by me at the moment I think I have to do it”, he said.
So far, the only name publicly mentioned by Lula was that of lawyer Cristiano Zanin, who defended him in the Lava Jato Operation processes. In recent weeks, pressure and campaigns by other listed companies have intensified, especially a woman, preferably a black one. Lula, however, has refused to assume any commitment regarding the profile of the nominee.
Before taking office, the president’s nominee must be questioned by the Senate’s Constitution and Justice Committee (CCJ) and then be approved by an absolute majority (41 votes) in the plenary of the House.
Career
With the departure of the Supreme Court, Lewandowski should return to advocacy and focus on his academic career, as he told journalists. He graduated from the University of São Paulo (USP), the same institution where he became a master and doctor and where he has been teaching since 1978.
His passage through the Supreme Court, where he arrived in 2006 at the suggestion of Lula himself, was marked by the so-called guaranteeism, a trend that tends to give greater weight to the rights and guarantees of defendants in proceedings.
He voted, for example, during the trial of the monthly allowance, of which he was a reviewer, for the acquittal of former Ministers of State José Dirceu and José Genoíno, in which he was defeated. At the time, he called the complaint against the two “vague”, as they would be based mainly on statements.
The trial of the monthly allowance gave rise to heated discussions in plenary, with the rapporteur of the criminal action and president of the Supreme Court at the time, Joaquim Barbosa, even accusing Lewandowski of “chicana” for wanting to postpone one of the plenary sessions. The minister demanded his colleague’s immediate retraction, and the confusion led to the suspension of the analysis of the case.
Lewandowski was the first Supreme Minister to point out deviations in Lava Jato’s actions and later became the rapporteur for the so-called “Vaza Jato”, a case that revealed exchanges of messages between judge Sergio Moro and prosecutors responsible for Lava Jato. The conversations later led to the annulment of Lula’s conviction in the case, as well as the suspension of the actions relating to several other defendants.
The minister personally suspended several processes of the operation, the most recent in mid-March, when he ordered an action based on information passed on by Odebrecht to be stopped, evidence that was later considered useless by the Supreme Court. Among the beneficiaries were former minister and former senator Edson Lobão, lawyer Rodrigo Tacla Duran, who worked for the contractor, and vice-admiral Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, former president of Eletronuclar.
important decisions
Other decisions of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) were associated with the name of Lewandowski, for having been the rapporteur of the subjects in the Court. He was responsible, for example, for habeas corpus collective to grant home prison to thousands of pregnant prisoners or mothers of children up to 12 years old. The decision was later confirmed by the Second Panel of the Supreme Court.
He was also the rapporteur of the action in which the Supreme Court unanimously judged that the quotas for black candidates at public universities. Due to this decision, the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, scheduled a tribute to Lewandowski this morning, at the ministry’s headquarters.
More recently, during the covid-19 pandemic, Lewandowski was the rapporteur for a lawsuit in the Supreme Court in which he ordered the government to accelerate and present a plan to vaccinate the population against the disease, with schedules for the acquisition and distribution of immunizers. The injunction would then be confirmed unanimously in plenary.
Presidencies
The minister presided over the Federal Supreme Court between 2014 and 2016, the year in which he also presided over the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, between May and August, in the Senate, as provided for in the Constitution.
One of his decisions at the time was to allow a split vote, with parliamentarians deciding first on the removal of the representative and only then on the sanctions that would be imposed. With that, she ended up not becoming ineligible after leaving office.
He was also president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) between 2010 and 2012. In office, he was at the head of the application of the Clean Record Law, which had been approved in 2010. As president of the National Council of Justice (CNJ), he signed the nationwide adoption of custody hearings – in which any prisoner must be brought before justice within 24 hours.
