Brazil's Bolsonaro used intelligence agency to spy on judges, lawmakers and journalists, police say
Brazil's federal police accused former president Jair Bolsonaro and 35 others of involvement in a sprawling scheme that used the country's intelligence agency to spy on members of the judiciary, lawmakers and journalists. The seal on the 1,125-page document, which adds to the far-right leader's woes, was lifted by the country's Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The federal police document said Bolsonaro was both aware of the scheme and its main beneficiary. Investigator Daniel Carvalho Brasil Nascimento, who chairs the probe, named one of the former president's sons, Rio de Janeiro councilor Carlos Bolsonaro, as a key plot member. The police investigation focuses on a so-called parallel structure in Brazil's intelligence agency.
'(Bolsonaro and Carlos) were responsible for the definitions of the criminal organization's strategic guidelines, for choosing the targets of the clandestine actions (against opponents, institutions, the electoral system) so they would politically gain from these operations,' the federal police said. 'They are the decision center and the main recipients of illicit advantages.'
Bolsonaro, who governed between 2019 and 2022 and is already barred by Brazil 's electoral court from running in next year's elections, is standing on trial over allegations that he attempted a coup to stay in office despite his 2022 defeat to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He denies any wrongdoing and claims he is being politically persecuted.
One of the counts Bolsonaro will be sentenced on in the coup case is precisely on leading a criminal organization, which stopped federal police from requesting the same for the accusations revealed on Wednesday, as both investigations entwine.
'If he were accused again for the same facts, this would most likely come up against a prohibition called prohibition obis in idem, a Latin formula that means double punishment or double accusation for the same act,' said João Pedro Padua, a law professor at the Fluminense Federal University.
The evidence revealed on Wednesday can still be used in the coup probe.
Celso Vilardi, a lawyer for Bolsonaro, told the The Associated Press he was yet to analyze the federal police report and its accusations against his client.
Brazil's federal police also accused Luiz Fernando Corrêa, the head of the country's intelligence agency under Lula, of undue interference in investigations. On Tuesday, staffers of the agency issued a statement to push for Corrêa's resignation. He did not respond a request for comment.
Brazil's Supreme Court will hand the police investigation to Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet, who will decide whether the investigation will be taken to the Supreme Court for trial.
Last year, police arrested five people in connection with the case, under the suspicion that the Brazilian intelligence agency was being misused.
Court documents showed then several authorities were under illegal investigation, including former speakers Arthur Lira and Rodrigo Maia, Supreme Court justices, officials of Brazil's environmental agency Ibama, former Sao Paulo Gov. João Doria and prominent political journalists.
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Savarese reported from Sao Paulo.
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Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Transgender rights advocates gird for more fights after US Supreme Court loss
WASHINGTON, June 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a blow to transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for adolescents, but legal experts said the ruling was narrower than it could have been and left open the door for challenges to the rising number of government restrictions aimed at transgender people. The court decided that Tennessee's Republican-backed law, which prohibits medical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormones for people under age 18 experiencing gender dysphoria, did not violate the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment promise of equal protection, as challengers to the measure had argued. The court's six conservative justices powered the ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, with its three liberal members dissenting. Transgender rights advocates called the decision a major setback while the law's backers welcomed the Supreme Court's endorsement and urged other states to adopt similar restrictions. Gender dysphoria is the clinical diagnosis for significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person's gender identity and sex assigned at birth. The ruling rejected the assertion made by the law's challengers that the measure was a form of discrimination - based on sex or transgender status - that should trigger tougher judicial review and make it harder to defend in court under 14th Amendment protections. Instead, the ruling concluded that the ban classified people based on age and medical diagnosis, and the court applied what is called a rational-basis review, a deferential analysis that merely requires a rational connection between a law and a legitimate state interest. Application of rational basis review by courts generally would make it easier to defend a broader array of measures curbing transgender rights, from bathroom use to sports participation. But Wednesday's ruling did not foreclose the possibility of courts in the future applying tougher scrutiny and finding unlawful discrimination in certain measures targeting transgender people. Karen Loewy, a lawyer with the LGBT rights group Lambda Legal, called the ruling heartbreaking for transgender youths and their families but saw some hope. "I think the court here went out of its way to confine what it was doing here to a restriction on care for minors," Loewy said, adding that it "left us plenty of tools to fight other bans on healthcare and other discriminatory actions that target transgender people." The court concluded that Tennessee did not create a sex-based category or specifically draw a line between transgender people and others, said Georgetown University law professor Paul Smith, who has argued many cases at the Supreme Court including a landmark gay rights victory in 2003. "Other statutes may not be viewed the same," Smith said. Roberts wrote that the "fierce scientific and policy debates" concerning the medical treatments at issue justified the court's deferential review of Tennessee's ban. Roberts added that questions about these treatments should be left "to the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process." Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a written dissent disagreed with that view. Judicial scrutiny, Sotomayor said, "has long played an essential role in guarding against legislative efforts to impose upon individuals the state's views about how people of a particular sex (or race) should live or look or act." The ban's proponents welcomed the ruling and the court's reasoning. "Voters, through their elected representatives, should have the power to decide what they believe on serious issues like this one," said Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican who signed the ban into law. Lee added that the measure protects young people from "irreversible, life-altering medical decisions." "This ruling sends a strong message to the country that states have a clear right and path forward to protect children from irreversible body mutilation," added Republican state legislator Jack Johnson, one of the lead sponsors of the Tennessee measure. The issue of transgender rights is a flashpoint in the U.S. culture wars. Tennessee's law is one of 25 such policies, opens new tab enacted by conservative state lawmakers around the United States, and various states have adopted other restrictions on transgender people. Donald Trump in particular has taken a hard line against transgender rights since returning to the presidency in January. Tennessee's law, passed in 2023, aims to encourage minors to "appreciate their sex" by prohibiting healthcare workers from prescribing puberty blockers and hormones to help them live as "a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex." In litigation brought by plaintiffs including transgender individuals and former President Joe Biden's administration, a federal judge blocked the law as likely violating the 14th Amendment. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently reversed the judge's decision. Lawyers for the challengers noted that the Supreme Court did not go as far as the 6th Circuit to decline to recognize transgender people as a class of people whose status requires courts to apply tougher judicial review to laws targeting them. The Supreme Court left that question unresolved. Future legal challenges may hinge on whether a law draws a line between transgender people and others, Smith said. "If a state refused to hire transgender people or excluded them from juries, for example, that might well lead the court to apply heightened scrutiny under a sex discrimination theory or under the theory that such a line itself warrants heightened scrutiny," Smith said. "Targeting transgender people out of animus, as other more-recent restrictions have done, still violates equal protection," said Pratik Shah, an attorney who also helped represent the plaintiffs. However, three conservative justices who wrote or joined opinions concurring in Wednesday's outcome - Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito - agreed with the 6th Circuit that laws based on transgender status do not merit tougher legal scrutiny like laws that divide people based on race or sex. Such a ruling "would require courts to oversee all manner of policy choices normally committed to legislative discretion," Barrett wrote. Though some transgender advocates had expressed concern that a ruling favoring Tennessee could bolster restrictions on transgender adults as well, Jennifer Levi of the LGBT rights legal group GLAD Law said Wednesday's decision was explicitly limited to care for minors and that challenges to restrictions on adults remain viable under existing precedent. The Supreme Court also did not rule on a separate argument made by the plaintiffs that laws like Tennessee's violate the right of parents to make decisions concerning the medical care of their children. Competent adults could similarly claim a right to make medical decisions about their own bodies, Smith said. In a previous major case involving transgender rights, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that a landmark federal law forbidding workplace discrimination protects gay and transgender employees. Chase Strangio, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the Tennessee case, made history in the case in December as the first openly transgender attorney to argue before the Supreme Court. Strangio emphasized the narrowness of Wednesday's ruling, but acknowledged its practical impact. "Of course the most immediate effect is on our clients, other young transgender people in Tennessee and across the country who need medical care that the government has stepped in to ban," Strangio said. "And for them we are devastated."
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
The US supreme court just undermined gender equality
B y now, it is a ritual: every June, Americans endure several weeks of agonizing suspense, as we wait to hear how the supreme court will erode our freedoms, attack our dignity, undermine self-government and empower those who enrich themselves at our expense. The court, controlled by career politicians in robes who were hand-selected for their loyalty to the rightwing and their willingness to be wildly intellectually dishonest in pursuit of Republican policy objectives, has ended the right to abortion, desiccated the Voting Rights Act, made state gun regulations nearly impossible and declared the president functionally immune to criminal law. Many of us waited, with a mixture and terror and disgust, to see what cruelties the court would deliver for us in 2025. The justices decided to start by attacking vulnerable children. In a 6-3 split, the court's conservatives ruled on Wednesday that Tennessee's law banning transition-related healthcare for minors can remain in effect. The law prohibits hormone therapies and surgeries only for their use in treating gender dysphoria; cisgender minors retain access to these drugs. The statute is on its face sex-specific and designed to mandate certain forms of gender conformity: the care that it bans, it bans on the basis of a patient's sex. This is in straightforward violation of the 14th amendment's equal protection clause, which has long been interpreted to ban facially sex-discriminatory laws and those that encourage sex-role stereotyping. The court decided to ignore this precedent and the plain intent of Tennessee's statute, and in the process it both imposed a cruel and needless deprivation on trans children and their families, and also substantially weakened constitutional guarantees of equal protection of the sexes. The ruling in United States v Skrmetti is likely to shield other bans on transition-related healthcare for minors, which are now on the books in most states. That alone will have a devastating impact on trans children, whom studies consistently show fare best under an affirmative model of care that retains the option to delay puberty or pursue cross-sex hormones – options that the court has now removed from these children and their parents. But the opinion's reasoning suggests something broader, and darker, about the status of trans people under the law – with dire implications for queer people, women, and anyone else not interested in or suited to living a neatly gender-conforming life. For in seeking to uphold Tennessee's care ban, the court circumvented sex equality provisions in a way that seems to render moot much of the 14th amendment's applicability to sex discrimination cases. Facially sex-discriminatory statutes are now broadly permissible, the court suggests, so long as they impose gendered limits on the conduct of people of both sexes. The reasoning, such as it is, of the majority in Skrmetti is thus: because the Tennessee law does not allow either assigned-male nor assigned-female minors to access transition-related care, the law must therefore not be sex discriminatory. This logic is almost laughably bad-faith: Tennessee's ban explicitly prohibits patients from accessing medicine on the basis of their sex, prohibiting male-assigned patients from accessing estrogen while permitting female-assigned patients to access it, and barring female-assigned patients from accessing testosterone while allowing it to be prescribed to male-assigned ones. Sex is the sole determining characteristic: it is sex that, under Tennessee's law, licenses conduct for some individuals and prohibits the same conduct for others. Facial sex discrimination, then, is not impermissible, according to the court, and not even subject to heightened scrutiny. Rather, all that functionally remains of the constitution's protection against sex inequality is a bar on 'invidious sex discrimination', a subjective and difficult to prove standard that much functional mistreatment of people on the basis of their sex or gender identity will fail to meet. The court seemingly goes out of its way to ensure that the obvious and plain anti-trans malice that motivates this law will not meet that threshold – claiming, preposterously, that trans people are not distinct enough, and have not suffered enough as a class, to be identifiable as a targeted group deserving of legal protection. What results is a kind of separate-but-equal logic of sex discrimination, in which persons of all sexes and genders are barred from opportunities that only people of certain sexes or genders require. The court has elevated this plain discrimination into a kind of parody of equality. What's left of equal protection? Over the past few years, the court has embarked on a project of allowing greater and greater discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons, carving out vast exceptions to allow their mistreatment under frameworks such as public accommodations civil rights law and staggeringly expansive understandings of religious freedom rights. Now, it has licensed states, too, to target trans people, and in the process, it has given them further leeway to discriminate against cis women. Skrmetti, after all, would not be possible without Dobbs, the supreme court's most sweeping bigoted assertion that there is no sex discrimination in place when a medical procedure that is only needed on the basis of sex is prohibited to those who do and do not require it alike. Skrmetti, which erodes sex equality under the 14th amendment, does not take aim at Bostock, the 2020 decision that found that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity were prohibited under the sex equality provision of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But it is hard to imagine that a court with so much hostility towards the civil rights claims of the historically marginalized will continue to find that gay and trans people can claim protection from discrimination under that law, either. It is not hard to imagine Skrmetti, along with Dobbs, being the opening salvos in a broader legal assault on the status of women and queer people – one that removes our rights one by one, making us more and more vulnerable, and sanctioning more and more of our derision, degradation and unfreedom. At the very least, this week, the court ruled that gender conformity can be enforced, at least on children, by the state. All queer people – and all cis women who aspire to be free – have had their dignity demeaned as a result. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
New Rio de Janeiro law requires public hospitals to display anti-abortion signs
A new law has just come into force in Rio de Janeiro requiring all public hospitals and clinics run by the municipal government to display anti-abortion signs bearing messages such as: 'Did you know that the unborn child is discarded as hospital waste?' Reproductive rights activists view the act as the latest example of a growing trend across Brazil to further restrict access to abortion in a country that already has some of the world's most restrictive laws. In Latin America's largest country, abortion is only legal in cases of rape, when the pregnant person's life is at risk, or if the foetus has anencephaly, a fatal brain disorder. In recent years, however, politicians, doctors and even judges have taken steps to prevent abortions even in those circumstances. Brazil's main hospital for such procedures, in São Paulo, stopped offering terminations after a decision by the city's mayor, a staunch supporter of former president Jair Bolsonaro, a strident anti-abortion advocate. A congressman from his party proposed a bill punishing abortions after 22 weeks – even in cases of rape or risk to life – with up to 20 years in prison. The federal medical council, which is reportedly dominated by Bolsonaro loyalists, last year banned doctors from using the safest method recommended by the World Health Organization for pregnancies over 22 weeks – a measure later deemed illegal by Brazil's supreme court. 'This is a direct result of the Bolsonaro years in power,' said anthropologist Debora Diniz, a professor at the University of Brasília and one of the country's leading reproductive rights researchers and activists. She acknowledges that the dispute between pro- and anti-abortion positions is not new. Diniz herself had to leave the country in 2018 after receiving death threats for her involvement in a campaign to push the supreme court to discuss decriminalising abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy – a reform that ultimately stalled. What has changed now, she says, is that the issue, once confined to the federal level, has become 'scattered' across local and regional authorities. 'Authoritarian governments in Latin America have a particular trait: they don't just disappear when their leader leaves office. Bolsonaro may be gone, but forces aligned with him and his ideas have occupied bodies like the medical council,' said Diniz. Such attempts are even more harmful given that legal abortion is not widely available across Brazil – only 4% of Brazilian cities have facilities and trained professionals to carry out the procedure, and that does not include even all state capitals. In the state of Goiás, a 13-year-old girl who had been raped turned to the courts after she was denied a legal abortion at a hospital, but a judge prohibited any method that would induce the death of the foetus. A higher court eventually authorised the abortion. In that state, the governor – also a Bolsonaro loyalist – signed a law requiring women seeking a legal abortion to first listen to the foetal heartbeat. Rio's anti-abortion signs law was approved last Friday by Mayor Eduardo Paes – who is not a Bolsonaro supporter and is aligned with the current leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The mayor's decision not to veto the law – which was proposed by three far-right city councillors – is being seen as a political move, as he is expected to run for state governor next year. Under the law, hospitals providing abortions must also display signs saying: 'You have the right to give your baby up for adoption anonymously … Give life a chance!' and 'Abortion can lead to consequences such as infertility, psychological problems, infections and even death.' Diniz said the second sign was even more problematic as there is no scientific evidence that abortion, when carried out safely and with medical support, causes any of those effects. 'This law is perverse because it is based on a false narrative of 'care' for women and girls, when in fact it is persecuting them,' said Diniz. On Tuesday, a public prosecutor filed a lawsuit arguing that the law is unconstitutional and requesting that the city government be barred from putting up the signs. The case is yet to be reviewed by a judge.
