Congress, Supreme Court battle on immunity rules

In late March, Brazil’s Supreme Court reopened a debate on the legal privileges enjoyed by politicians and other public officials — the so-called foro privilegiado, a form of parliamentary immunity.

Under this constitutional instrument, thousands of members of all branches of government can only be prosecuted and tried by specific courts. For example, the president, cabinet ministers, and federal lawmakers are tried in the Supreme Court; governors are tried in the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), Brazil’s second-highest judicial body, and so on.

Parliamentary immunity, which in Brazil is extended to members of the Executive and Judicial branches, was ostensibly intended to protect people in office from abuse by opponents with power in local courts, but has notoriously become a loophole for impunity.

A 2017 study by Senate staffers found that nearly 55,000 officials in Brazil enjoy some degree of parliamentary immunity, including more than 1,000 state lawmakers, 5,500 mayors, 10,000 state prosecutors, and 17,000 trial court judges.

The legal precedents on parliamentary immunity have been widely abused by politicians to avoid being tried for their crimes.

In one of several high-profile examples, then-Congressman Eduardo Azeredo resigned in 2014, twelve days after the Prosecutor-General asked the Supreme Court to try him for embezzlement and money laundering committed in 1998 during Mr. Azeredo’s failed re-election campaign as governor of Minas Gerais.

By resigning, Mr. Azeredo ensured that the Supreme Court would send his case back to a trial court in...