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The Supreme Sovereign in the State of Exemption: the (un)application of the law by the Brazilian Supreme Court in the “Fake News” Inquiry (Inquiry n. 4.781)

Abstract

In 2019, the Chief Justice of the STF initiated a procedure to investigate alleged practices of disclosing fraudulent news and infractions committed against the Court, its members and their relatives. In the course of this secret Inquiry (no. 4,781), many unconstitutional decisions were enacted, censoring media outlets, restricting freedoms and procedural guarantees of Brazilian citizens, and materializing all sorts of judicial arbitrariness, always under the justification of safeguarding the constitutional order. In view of this situation, this paper intends to verify whether it is possible to establish a relationship between these institutional behaviors of the Brazilian Supreme Court and Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception. For this purpose, the work carries out an initial bibliographic review and, afterwards, questions the constitutionality of the judicial decisions rendered by the Court. In the end, it is concluded that there is a characterization of some elements constituting the state of exception in the Brazilian reality.

Keywords:
Giorgio Agamben; State of Exemption; Supremo Tribunal Federal; Inquiry n 4;781; Fake News

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