They say that if the advice was good it would not be free. However, with almost three thousand daily deaths and the health system collapsing, we can only give some advice to President Bolsonaro.
We do not know whether Bolsonaro is being well advised or whether he is listening to people who have completely detached him from reality, but his actions do not have the least legal and human reason about the horrific facts of the pandemic here.
Let us note that Bolsonaro has proposed lawsuits
against decrees of governors who are imposing necessary restrictions. Actions doomed to failure, as there is no new right in the decrees that imply extrapolating legislative competence, they only regulate regional health management acts.
However, Bolsonaro aims only to reiterate that it is the STF that dictates the rules on pandemic management and that it can do nothing. But it has a side effect: they are legally dangerous for the president.
Dangerous because they make tangible, they give materiality, which until then was limited to loose phrases. The legal measures leave concrete evidence that the federal government is opposed to isolation and restrictions on contact between people.
There is no serious disagreement about the fact that there are few measures to contain the circulation of the virus: vaccine and social distancing. At this point, it is very legally dangerous to go against what the world is doing to fight the virus.
Bolsonaro needs to admit that the epidemic is out of control; is killing people and the economy at the same time. It kills people due to the aggressiveness of the disease and the lack of equipment. It kills the economy because it opens and closes for a long time, it survives the impressive numbers of infected people that shake the economy that cannot open full force.
Bolsonaro should take advantage of the holidays in São Paulo, the various circulation restriction measures underway, even the suspension of work at Volks, as examples, to amend a national measure.
He should manage humanitarian actions led by the Armed Forces and Police, together with governors, for the distribution of basic food baskets in the twenty-one days, which are recommended by lockdown scholars. It needs to completely curb the circulation of people and, consequently, of the virus, in order to open the economy and allow time for vaccination to show signs of success.
And, aside, all the political agents involved, Bolsonaro, Ciro, Lula, Doria, should propose a truce of adjectives in social network in favor of the Brazilian people. At least during 2021.
Bolsonaro needs to know that what was just conflicting public health management in 2020 is no longer. There are already paradigms in countries that have applied lockdown. It is already known that chloroquine does not work. His omissive/commissive attitudes, against all established international health standards, put him one step closer to international law and its legal consequences.
All Bolsonaro has done is to produce evidence against him. If there were doubts about what to do in 2020, from the middle of the second half of that year, it no longer occurred.
Bolsonaro needs to be warned about the universal criminal judgment in the field of human rights. Law that placed Pinochet in repressive international jurisdiction, and can be used by courts in other countries to prosecute and punish acts recognized as crimes under international law.
Recalling, in 1996, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón ordered Pinochet arrested on charges of involvement in the disappearance of Spanish citizens in Argentina and Chile.
Pinochet was arrested in England, where he was undergoing a medical procedure, that is, not on an official mission, despite being a Chilean senator for life. He spent more than 500 days in England, returning to Chile due to illness, embarrassing the Chilean Judiciary, which had done nothing so far.
The door will be wide open for any country or court to take the initiative at any time in the future. They will only need a legal link.
What we want to emphasize is that international law works a lot with facts antecedents, long before it is a justice of judicial precedents, since it is very new. Therefore, ad doc courts, such as from Nuremberg, to Rwanda or Yugoslavia, preceded the International Criminal Court itself.
There are new themes for international courts: ecocide, pandemic; the world will demand an answer in due time.
Therefore, there is no point in sending an entourage to Israel to show solidarity with the ICC case and the Palestinian issue, because even Israel has maintained strict measures against the pandemic, and will turn their backs on issues that will be deprived at some point in the future.
The step taken by Ernesto Araújo to put a mask on Israel was not without meaning. Diplomatic measures are very formal, but the admonition for not wearing the mask was on the tip of the Israeli agent’s tongue. It was a sign.
Thus, indicating the ways to save the lives of Brazilians also serves, reflexively, to alleviate the legal framework that Bolsonaro draws for himself.
Cássio Faeddo is a Lawyer; Master in Law and MBA in International Relations – FGV / SP.
