The rapporteur of six of the seven actions of the “green agenda” of the STF (Supreme Federal Court), Minister Cármen Lúcia, voted this Thursday (7) against an amendment made by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in the deliberative council of the FNMA (Fund Environment National).
In this case, the Supreme Court judges a request from Rede Sustentabilidade against a 2020 decree by Bolsonaro and Ricardo Salles, then Minister of the Environment, which excluded civil society from the council.
After the decree, the council was made up only of members of federal government agencies, such as the Ministries of the Environment, Civil House and Economy.
In her vote, the minister also understood that another decree that removed the governors that make up the Legal Amazon from participating in the region’s national council is unconstitutional.
According to Cármen Lúcia, the elimination of civil society shows “a centralization that would be undemocratic”, which would “de-legitimize state actions in violation of the principle of popular participation”.
“The popular participation of civil society in all instances has always been encouraged by the Constitution, legislation and international documents,” said the minister.
Minister Ricardo Lewandowski fully followed the vote of Cármen Lúcia. “The administrative acts offended this new regime that was inaugurated with the Federal Constitution of 1988, which is precisely participatory democracy, which does not replace representative democracy, but complements it,” he said.
The other nine ministers of the Supreme Court have not yet commented on this issue.
According to the Network’s action, “the participatory democratic character of the FNMA’s Deliberative Council has been completely extinguished, and the body is at risk of losing its raison d’être as the locus in charge of defining the allocation of support to projects of an environmental nature. “.
He also said that “in the context of environmental policy, the constitutional text foresaw the need for the direct participation of the people, as an instrument for the realization of the principle of substantial equality”.
The Attorney General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, opposed the action. In his demonstration, he criticized non-governmental organizations that work in the Amazon.
“Five years ago, in a survey carried out by the press and official bodies, there were 3,300 NGOs in this country, 3,000 in the Amazon, 300 in the rest of Brazil. This fact imposes a certain caution on us so that national interests, so that popular sovereignty is , in a substantive democracy that we so desire, preserved, guaranteed and defended throughout society by the state through its institutions”, he said.
This is the third action on the green agenda that has begun to be judged by the Supreme Court. In recent weeks, the simultaneous trial of two cases that questioned alleged omissions by Bolsonaro about deforestation in the Amazon has also started.
After a long vote by the rapporteur Cármen Lúcia in the first two cases, which took almost two sessions of the STF, Minister André Mendonça, who would give the next vote, asked for a view (more time for analysis) and interrupted the judgment of the actions.
Carmen Lúcia had voted to order the federal government to present an “effective and satisfactory” execution plan within 60 days to reduce deforestation in the Amazon and protect the rights of indigenous people living in the region.
The environmental agenda is seen as a reaction by the Supreme Court to what experts point out as a dismantling of public policies in the Jair Bolsonaro administration, especially those related to the Amazon.
