The relationships Daniel Vorcaro maintained with authorities at the highest levels of Brazil’s judiciary, revealed with particular intensity after the investigations in the Master case were fully unsealed, should prompt a reflection that goes far beyond the names involved in this episode. It is not our place to anticipate individual responsibility, much less to take the place of the institutions charged with investigating and judging it. But we can, and should, ask a question that concerns all of us: at what point did we come to accept the idea that personal, family, or professional relationships can serve as shortcuts for those who need a ruling from the courts?
Shared trips, private meetings, extraordinarily large contracts with law firms tied to the relatives of judges, and direct lines of communication with officials all feed a deeply corrosive perception: that, beyond the front door of the justice system, there is a side entrance, well known and used by those with enough money, connections, and influence to reach it.
An important distinction must be made. Lawyers have the right, and often the professional duty, to approach judges, submit briefs, argue legal theories, and seek institutional dialogue. The problem begins when what should be the legitimate practice of law becomes entangled with private networks of relationships capable of producing an advantage that is not available to other citizens.
That is why creating a code of conduct for the high courts, with objective rules on conflicts of interest, family relationships, recusals, and transparency of judges’ schedules, has become an institutional necessity. But it would be a mistake to believe that a new set of rules, by itself, will solve the problem. The problem runs deeper. There is an economy of proximity in Brazil because access to justice itself remains distributed in a brutally unequal way.
The 1988 Constitution did not establish courts for first-class citizens and courts for everyone else. It did not create a fast-track justice system for those who manage to reach judges’ chambers and another, far slower one for those who wait months or years for a response from the state. Even so, it is hard to ignore the gap between the constitutional ideal and the everyday experience of millions of Brazilians.
On one side are individuals and companies able to hire sophisticated legal teams, mobilize highly specialized professionals, and maintain direct contact with decision-making centers. On the other, millions of citizens depend solely on the Public Defender’s Office, an institution indispensable to Brazilian democracy, but one that is overwhelmed by immense demand and still unable to reach the entire national territory with the same presence.
I know this second reality firsthand through the work of the Humanitas360 Institute in the prison system. Inside a prison, the slowness of justice ceases to be a legal abstraction. It becomes time out of a person’s life.
A sentence progression that is never reviewed, a petition that is never filed, a sentence that is never recalculated, or a detention that is not reassessed at the right moment can mean months or even years of additional incarceration. And the most troubling part is that, periodically, the very joint task forces set up to review prison cases (mutirões carcerários) uncover people who already met the conditions to leave prison. When an extraordinary effort is needed to correct what the routine of the courts failed to see, it is clear that the flaw lies in how the system itself functions.
We are facing two sides of the same problem. On one, justice responds swiftly to those who hold financial, family, or relational capital. On the other, it is slow and fails those who have only the text of the law on their side.
Regulating legal lobbying, setting transparent limits on relationships among judges, law firms, and interested parties, and confronting conflicts of interest are urgent measures. Far from weakening the Supreme Federal Court or any other institution of the justice system, transparency protects citizens, the judiciary itself, and above all, democracy. Strong institutions are those that know how to look inward, acknowledge their risks, and answer to society.
Access to justice cannot depend on an inherited surname, on a phone call that happens to get answered, or on knowing which paths to take. In the Republic envisioned by the 1988 Constitution, there should be one entrance, the same for everyone.
Patrícia Villela Marino
President of the Humanitas360 Institute, member of the Council for Sustainable Economic and Social Development of the Presidency of the Republic, and of the Collective Derrubando Muros
