Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Luiz Fux on Wednesday voted to acquit former President Jair Bolsonaro of coup-plotting charges and annul his trial, arguing the high court lacked jurisdiction, a move that broke with his colleagues and raised the prospect of an appeal.
The five-judge panel is still expected to convict Bolsonaro of attempting to cling to power after losing the 2022 election. Two judges have already voted for conviction, while the remaining two were appointed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Bolsonaro at the polls.
In his dissent, Fux sided with Bolsonaro’s lawyers, who argued that the trial was riddled with procedural errors and should have been heard by lower courts since Bolsonaro no longer holds public office.
“I vote … that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to judge this case because the defendants had already lost their (political) positions,” Fux said during the trial’s final deliberations. He added that, once the court took up the case, it should have been handled by the full bench of 11 justices rather than a five-judge panel.
Fux also criticised the volume of evidence handed to the defence, saying it deprived them of a fair opportunity to prepare. “I’m not an expert in this area, but the volume reached 70 terabytes, I couldn’t believe it, because that’s billions of pages. Yet it was only on April 30, 2025, that a decision was issued granting access to the media and materials seized during the investigative phase,” he said.
Bolsonaro is accused of participating in an armed criminal organisation, attempting to violently abolish democracy, organising a coup and damaging government property during the January 2023 riots, when thousands of his supporters stormed Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court in Brasília.
His lawyer, Celso Vilardi, has maintained that Bolsonaro is innocent and was denied due process. “We did not have access to the evidence, and much less had enough time to go through it,” Vilardi told the court last week.
Guilherme Madeira, a law professor at the University of São Paulo, said the scope of Fux’s dissent was striking. “There was surprise at the breadth of the dissent, which went beyond procedural issues and questioned the very existence of the alleged crimes,” he noted.
The split on the court has added fuel to an already polarised political climate. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters have rallied in protest, while the case continues to divide public opinion.
A drawn-out appeals process could push the proceedings closer to Brazil’s 2026 presidential race, in which Bolsonaro has said he intends to run. He has already been barred from holding office in a separate case over his false claims about the country’s electronic voting system.
Fux, who was appointed to the court by former President Dilma Rousseff, is expected to continue voting on the cases of other defendants before Justice Cármen Lúcia begins her turn.
