Jun 13 2025| Nº. 170

Editorial

This week, Brazil’s Supreme Court (STF) pressed forward with its investigation into an alleged coup plot involving former President Jair Bolsonaro and key allies. Over two days of interrogations, Bolsonaro and seven co-defendants faced questions from STF Minister Alexandre de Moraes regarding meetings in which prosecutors say anti-democratic plans—centered on a so-called "draft coup decree"—were discussed. While the defendants denied plotting to overturn the 2022 election, officials say the hearings reinforced the charges, especially with corroboration from Mauro Cid, a former Bolsonaro aide who turned state's witness. With this phase complete, the case now moves toward closing arguments and a possible ruling later this year, as the court weighs potential convictions in one of Brazil’s most consequential political trials. Separately, Bolsonaro's defense team has requested the annulment of Cid's plea deal and the reassignment of the case out of Moraes’s purview, arguing bias and questioning the legitimacy of the evidence. These legal maneuvers aim to challenge the credibility of damning testimony for the former president and could influence the case’s trajectory. As the proceedings intensify, the political and legal stakes remain high while the country looks toward an election next year in which Bolsonaro continues to hold sway despite being barred from running.

While national attention focused on this legal drama, the spotlight on Wednesday, June 11 shifted momentarily to Congress, where Finance Minister Fernando Haddad delivered a blunt challenge to lawmakers: address the country’s most entrenched fiscal distortions or risk deepening the strain on the medium-term financial outlook. In a public hearing, Haddad called on Congress to confront unresolved issues such as excessive public-sector salaries, military pensions, and inefficiencies in social programs. Clearly frustrated by political inertia and high expectations on his own ability to solve problems generally outside the scope of his powers as cabinet minister, Haddad reminded legislators that while the government has already taken difficult cost-cutting steps, like revising minimum wage and wage bonus policies, key fiscal reform proposals remain untouched. In an effort to replace a planned hike in the financial operations tax (IOF), Haddad also pitched new tax measures, including ending income tax exemptions for some popular investment products—moves he described not as tax increases, but as “corrections of distortions” worth R$41 billion. Haddad emphasized that these steps are essential to restore fiscal balance, insisting that progress depends on the political will of an often-hostile Congress, not just technical solutions.

However, Speaker of the House Hugo Motta, who has had a generally solid working relationship with the Lula government since assuming his post earlier this year, signaled that Congress won’t accept tax hikes without significant spending cuts, warning against what he said was electoral posturing from the administration. As Brazil’s economic and judicial institutions wrestle with overlapping crises, the government’s path forward appears increasingly tied to whether Congress is willing to share the burden of cost-cutting reforms.

Highlights

• Big tech. The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that technology companies that manage social networks, the so-called big tech, are responsible for removing posts with criminal content even when there is no court order to remove them. The decision will lead to the reform of Article 19 of the Internet Civil Rights Framework. The decision is considered definitive because there are already enough votes by justices in this direction, but it has not yet been officially issued, which should only happen next week.

• Military dictatorship. Two governors of large Brazilian states and potential candidates for the 2026 presidential election – Romeu Zema from Minas Gerais and Ronaldo Caiado from Goiás – have made public statements in recent days denying that there was a coup d'état in Brazil in 1964 and a dictatorship that lasted until 1985. Zema said that “there are different interpretations” of the facts, while Caiado said that everything is a “matter of interpretation.” Both statements show that, even with Bolsonaro’s defeat and the ongoing trial against him for attempted coup d’état in 2022/2023, this political sector continues to openly threaten democracy with positions that omit or openly distort historical facts.

• Betting companies. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry created in November 2024 to investigate the actions of sports betting companies in Brazil ended with its final report rejected this Wednesday, June 11, by a vote of 4 to 3. The report, written by federal congresswoman Soraya Thronicke, called for the indictment of 16 people, including famous influencers, businesspeople, and owners of betting websites. The rapporteur said that the actions of these companies have transformed the issue of betting not only into an economic problem for millions of Brazilians, but also into a public health issue, due to compulsive behavior encouraged by omnipresent advertising.

• Fugitive extremist. The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Hugo Motta, has frozen the salary of federal congresswoman Carla Zambelli. She was sentenced by the Brazilian Supreme Court to 10 years in prison for having hired a hacker to invade the computer system of the National Council of Justice at the height of the coup plot during the Bolsonaro government. Zambelli, who is a leading figure in the far right, fled to the United States and from there to Italy. She has dual citizenship, but the Supreme Court has asked Interpol for an international arrest warrant against her.

News from ABO and social organizations and movements:

New article. In his latest column published on the Agência Pública website, James N. Green, president of the WBO Board of Directors, talks about what he calls “the end of the beautiful bromance” between US President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk. For Green, the resounding breakup between the two “was not only inevitable, but also predictable.” The two “simply could not occupy the same space at the same time,” says the column, which can be read at the link.

Open letter. This week, the Brazil Office signed an open letter addressed to the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Hugo Motta, and other congressional representatives asking for more debates and public consultations on the processing of Bill 1087/2025, which deals with income tax reform in Brazil. The action, led by Oxfam, calls for greater transparency and popular participation, so that taxation in Brazil does not burden the poorest. Click on the link to learn more.

Against genocide. Participants in the National Day of Struggle for Women Affected by Dams held a political and peaceful demonstration against the Palestinian genocide in front of the Embassy of the Palestinian State in Brasília. The organization brought to the event “Brazilian children affected by dams, symbolizing the future destroyed by the conflict” in the Gaza Strip.

Brazilian immigrants. A group of civil society organizations representing Brazilians in the United States launched a denunciation of the mistreatment imposed by the American government on immigrants and called on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to intercede on their behalf. In addition to the organizations, a group of Massachusetts legislators also signed the appeal, which even spoke about torture imposed by government agents against Brazilian immigrants.

Feature Article

The Stakeholder Group of People of African Descent is created at the UN

By Kátia Mello*

The official announcement of the creation of the Stakeholder Group of People of African Descent at the United Nations in May is a historic victory for Geledés-Instituto da Mulher Negra, which initiated this campaign at the UN in September 2023. More than that, it is a victory for all global diasporas, since for the first time, Afro-descendant voices, in an institutionalized way, are included in the participatory structures of the United Nations. In addition to Geledés, the co-presidency (Steering Committee) includes the NGO Criola and UNARC (UN Anti-racism Coalition).

The Main Groups and Other Stakeholders, established during the Earth Summit (Rio-92), are articulation groups between civil society and international organizations. They are responsible for making policy proposals, official statements, and recommendations to UN member states.

Originally, new Major Groups were established at the UN in the following areas: women, children and youth, Indigenous peoples, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), local authorities (subnational governments), workers and unions, business and industry, scientific and technological community, and farmers. Over time, there was an extension to the so-called specific stakeholders, made up of people with disabilities, the elderly, the LGBTQIA+ community, migrants, cooperatives, and now Afro-descendants.

The call for a specific Stakeholder Group for Afro-descendants at the UN represented a strategic shift in the dispute for spaces of influence in global governance structures. In proposing the creation of this group, an organization founded and led by Black women, defended the idea of ​​inserting the racial and reparatory justice agenda at the heart of the formulation and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), based precisely on a platform that enables structured exchanges with States, multilateral agencies, and other civil society actors.

Since the group's first public demand in September 2023, Geledés has intensified its efforts in this direction, engaging in partnerships with institutions from different continents that address structural racism and work on the sustainable development agenda. This mobilization required a sophisticated reading of how multilateral systems work and an understanding of the exact role of Major Groups and other Stakeholders as intermediary mechanisms between the different diasporas and UN agencies.

The presence of Geledés' international advisor Letícia Leobet in the session “Perspectives of Major Groups and other Stakeholders: Partnerships for Urgent Transformations and Actions” during the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) in July 2024 reinforced this position. Her intervention highlighted the urgency of mechanisms that not only include them, but also consider the leading role of Afro-descendant voices in debates on global transformation and intergenerational justice.

This work continued in September 2024, in New York, in parallel with the Future Summit, with the event “Addressing Racism as a Central Issue in the Global Agenda for the Future,” promoted by Geledés. In it, Leobet reiterated once again the need to institutionalize a specific mechanism for the Afro-descendant community. The proposal reflected an implicit criticism of the historical underrepresentation of this group in international decision-making structures, while also pointing out ways to reposition the anti-racist struggle in the context of contemporary global transitions.

From Durban to the UN

Historically, the creation of the Stakeholder Group of People of African Descent refers to an ongoing and arduous anti-racist struggle made explicit during the World Conference against Racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa in 2001. It was at this conference that racism was finally recognized as structural, systemic, and global, and that a reparations agenda was inserted into the international agenda.

At this time of attacks on global multilateralism, the new Stakeholder Group for People of African Descent has emerged to ensure, as a permanent institutional mechanism, that the commitments reinforced two decades ago in Durban are truly implemented within the framework of the 2030 Agenda, the Future Pact, and the development financing agendas, among others.

With the end of the First International Decade for People of African Descent (2015–2024) and the recent proclamation of the Second International Decade (2025–2034) by the UN General Assembly, a new arrangement is emerging as a way to continue the struggle for recognition and justice. Although the previous decade saw important advances in the agendas of the Afro-descendant population, the desires for recognition, justice and development still remain largely unfulfilled. In this context, the Stakeholder Group emerges as a concrete response to the historical exclusion of this population from the UN's participatory mechanisms. Aligned with the spirit and renewed goals for the new decade, the group aims to amplify the voice of Afro-descendants, strengthening their presence and necessary influence in the participation of global debates. 

*Kátia Mello is a journalist from Geledés and holds a Master's in African Studies from the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.