Brazil’s Supreme Court voted this Monday with six votes in favor and five against declaring unconstitutional the amendments to the rapporteur, or «secret budgets», which have served the government of Jair Bolsonaro to maintain governability within a House of Representatives well known for its political clientelism.
The «secret budgets» are a mechanism approved in mid-2020 with which each year a parliamentarian has exercised as «rapporteur» on budget items to suggest to federal ministries where and how to allocate it.
This is a highly questioned resource since it violates, as established by the Supreme Court, the principles of transparency and impersonality required by any budget law. In recent years, these funds have been distributed without technical criteria and have supplied local and regional entities allied to the government.
Last week, the Brazilian Congress approved a resolution to make these amendments to the rapporteur more transparent. However, for Judge Ricardo Lewandowski, who was in charge of breaking the tie-breaking vote, the measure, although it represented «significant progress», was insufficient.
Lewandowski has argued that the resolution delegated to party leaders to choose, without any objective basis, which deputies would be in charge of managing these funds and therefore «constitutional vices» persist.
Before this Monday’s session, last Thursday, four judges had already voted in line with the president of the Supreme Court, Rosa Weber, in charge of the case, voting in favor of declaring the amendments to the rapporteur unconstitutional.
On the other side of the vote, the rest of the judges, although they voted against declaring them unconstitutional, asked that they continue to be reformed, especially in terms of transparency, in order to remain in force.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
