Brazil Hunts for a Bahia Appeals Judge and Her Son, Convicted of Selling Rulings, Who Flew to Lisbon Six Weeks Before the Verdict

Brazil has asked for the arrest of a retired appeals-court judge and her son, both convicted of corruption last week, after prosecutors told the court the pair had flown to Lisbon in September. According to Público Brasil, the two have been placed on Interpol's wanted list at the request of Brazil's Superior Tribunal de Justiça (STJ, the Superior Court of Justice), and the court has cleared the way for an extradition request to Portugal.

The judge is Sandra Inês Moraes Rusciolelli Azevedo, a retired desembargadora (a judge of a state appeals court) of the Bahia Court of Justice. Her son, Vasco Rusciolelli Azevedo, is a lawyer.

The conviction

On Wednesday 4 November the STJ's Corte Especial (its special bench for cases against senior judges) convicted both in criminal case APn 953, part of Operação Faroeste, an investigation into the sale of court rulings in land disputes in western Bahia. The STJ's own release says she was sentenced to 14 years and 20 days in prison, in a closed regime, for passive corruption and money laundering, and that the court stripped her of her compulsory-retirement pension. Her son received 13 years and 11 months for passive corruption, money laundering and criminal association.

Brazil's federal prosecution service says the vote was unanimous. It alleged that between 2017 and 2020 she issued four rulings in three cases in favour of an agribusiness company, in return for bribes negotiated at 4 million reais, of which 3.3 million were allegedly paid.

The arrest order

Público reports that the STJ judge in charge of the case, Og Fernandes, ordered their arrest after prosecutors said airline and Federal Police records showed mother and son left Brazil for Lisbon on 21 September and landed the next day. A court officer later failed to find them at the address they had given the court. Público reports that the judge concluded they had fled rather than travelled, and that the authorities suspect they may have moved on elsewhere in Europe.

The order is a prisão preventiva, a precautionary detention, rather than an order to start serving the sentence. Neither the STJ nor the prosecutors' release says whether the conviction can still be appealed. We found no statement from the Polícia Judiciária or Portugal's Procuradoria-Geral da República (PGR, the Prosecutor General's Office), and no report that either of them has been found or detained.

How extradition works in Portugal

Under Portugal's law on international judicial cooperation in criminal matters, Lei n.º 144/99, extradition is an urgent procedure with two stages:

• Administrative: the PGR reviews the request and the Minister of Justice decides whether it may proceed, and can refuse it on political grounds or grounds of expediency (articles 46 and 48).
• Judicial: the criminal section of the Tribunal da Relação (appeal court) for the district where the person is found decides whether the legal conditions are met, without re-examining the evidence; its final decision can be appealed to the Supreme Court of Justice (articles 46 and 49).

What it means for residents

For the large Brazilian community here (more than 134,000 Brazilians were registered to vote in Portugal in October), nothing changes. The case does show the limits of a foreign arrest order: under the law above, whether anyone wanted abroad is handed over is decided by a Portuguese minister and a Portuguese court, not by the country asking.