Supreme Court president Edson Fachin told judges from Portuguese-speaking countries that the Jan. 8 trials followed "strict observance of due process," Gazeta do Povo reported. The cases are still open, and critics say the sentences were excessive.
BRASILIA — Supreme Court president Edson Fachin told an audience of judges and legal advisers from Portuguese-speaking countries that the convictions for the Jan. 8, 2023 riots happened “in strict observance of due process of law,” Gazeta do Povo reported. He said the Court was “the target of those who attacked constitutional democracy.”
Fachin used the speech to point his guests to photos of the riots on display in the Court’s own museum. He praised his predecessor, now-retired justice Rosa Weber, for rebuilding the building and the institution, and explained that the reference to the riots was meant “as an alert and a stimulus”: an alert against threats that take “particularly aggressive forms” at some moments in history, and a stimulus to keep working “with determination and fidelity to the Constitution.”
Who is judging whom
The Court is the victim, the investigator and the judge in these cases, and its president chose a conference of foreign magistrates to say the process was clean. That is a statement about the Court, made by the Court, to an audience that cannot examine the files. It does not answer the question critics have asked since 2023.
The numbers are public. In April, the office of justice Alexandre de Moraes released a balance of 1,402 convictions: 431 people in prison, 419 serving alternative sentences and 552 who signed non-prosecution agreements. The cases are still being tried. Politicians, jurists and commentators argue that the sentences were excessive and that the rulings did not individualize each defendant’s conduct, treating a crowd as a single act.
Why it matters
For American readers, the Jan. 6 comparison comes up first, and it is the wrong one if it stops at the date. The question in Brazil is procedural: the same Court that was attacked chose the rapporteur, set the sentences and now describes its own fairness to foreign visitors. The audience was judges from countries that share Brazil’s language and legal tradition. What Fachin tells them is a template for how a court can defend itself without ever submitting to outside review. This is the same pattern seen in the reporting on Moraes’s secret phone and data dragnet, where the files are to stay sealed.
The record
What is documented: Fachin’s words at the event, as reported by Gazeta do Povo, and the April balance published by Moraes’s office. What is contested: whether the trials respected due process, which Fachin affirms and critics deny. Two cases are cited most often by the right. Débora Rodrigues dos Santos, known as “Débora do Batom,” a mother of two, was sentenced to 14 years for writing “perdeu, mané” (“you lost, buddy”) in lipstick on the Justice statue; she now serves at home. Cleriston Pereira da Cunha, known as Clezão, died on Nov. 20, 2023 in Papuda prison, still in pretrial detention, after the prosecutor general’s office had defended his release. Moraes did not rule on that opinion in time.
A Court that calls its own verdicts a model of due process, while one defendant dies waiting for a ruling and another serves 14 years for a graffiti, has not settled the argument. It has asked foreign judges to stop asking. Under the Lula regime, which came to power in an election millions of Brazilians still dispute, the justices have become the loudest defenders of the system that put them in charge of judging it.
The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sources: Gazeta do Povo; Supreme Court (STF) statements; balance released by the office of justice Alexandre de Moraes (April 2026).
Featured image: 11.03.2026 – Audiência com presidente do STF, ministro Edson Fachin – 55142930258 by Governo RS, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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