President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva fully vetoed, this Thursday (8), the Bill No. 2,162 of 2023known as Dosimetry PL, approved in December by the National Congress. THE text provides for the reduction of sentences for those convicted of undemocratic acts of January 8 and the attempted coup d’état.
The announcement was made during an event, at Palácio do Planalto, which marks three years since the attacks perpetrated by protesters supporting Bolsonaro who, unhappy with the results of the elections, invaded the National Congress, the Planalto Palace and the Federal Supreme Court (STF).
“They all had ample rights of defense, were tried with transparency and impartiality. And, at the end of the trial, convicted on the basis of robust evidence, and not on the basis of serial illegalities, mere convictions or [apresentações de] Fake Powerpoint”, said Lula.
“I want to congratulate the Supreme Court for its irreproachable conduct throughout this entire process. It judged and sentenced in strict compliance with the law. It did not surrender to pressure, it was not frightened by threats. It did not allow itself to be carried away by revanchism. It emerged strengthened. Its conduct will certainly be remembered by history”, he added.
Quoting the Spanish-American poet George Santayana, Lula concluded: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the name of the future, we do not have the right today to forget the past. Therefore, we accept neither civil dictatorship nor military dictatorship. What we want is democracy emanating from the people and to be exercised in the name of the people.”
With the veto, the project returns to Congress.
Understand
The Dosimetry PL determines that the crimes of attempting to end the Democratic Rule of Law and coup d’état, when committed in the same context, will imply the use of the most serious penalty instead of the sum of both penalties.
The focus of the project is a change in the calculation of sentences, “calibrating the minimum and maximum sentences of each criminal type, as well as the general way in which sentences are calculated”. The text also reduces the time for progression of the prison regime from closed to semi-open or open.
Such changes could benefit convicts of January 8thsuch as former president Jair Bolsonaro, in addition to the military Almir Garnier, former commander of the Navy; Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, former Minister of Defense; Walter Braga Netto, former Minister of the Civil House; and Augusto Heleno, former head of the Institutional Security Office (GSI).
The bill also would reduce sentence progression time for some common criminalsaccording to experts interviewed by Brazil Agency.
