Gabriela Guerreiro and Iolando Lourenço
Reporters - Agência Brasil

Brasília - The president of the Council of Ethics, Deputy Ricardo Izar (PTB-SP), said, yesterday (3), that the council can shelve requests to revoke the mandates of deputies, if the requests lack the necessary underpinnings to justify opening the process. "If they don't have a justification, concrete proof, it makes no sense even to chose a reporter. We, the 15 members of the Council, will meet, and the suits that lack concrete proofs will be shelved immediately," he declared.

In Izar's view, the council lacks the structure to analyze so many requests. "Were we to initiate a suit in each case, we have neither structure nor conditions to handle them. It would take us a great deal of time," he said. Izar said that he sent a request to the Legislative Advisory service of the Chamber to find out whether a single suit could be opened in the Council of Ethics to analyze all the petitions simultaneously. This is the way he intends to speed up the process.

Izar said he plans to send a similar request to the Federal Supreme Court (STF), to avoid any future judicial challenge to the legality of the decisions taken by the council. He explained that judging a legislator in the Council of Ethics has to do with his or her political conduct. Any criminal acts that might have been committed, he said, should be analyzed by the Federal Public Defense Ministry.

Translation: David Silberstein