Filipe Martins, former international affairs advisor to Jair Bolsonaro (PL), has been in prison since February 8. His preventive detention was ordered by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Martins has been in prison for almost six months, despite never having been convicted of any crime — nor even charged.
Shortly after Moraes’ order, the Attorney General’s Office, which had initially advocated for Martins’ arrest, came out in favor of releasing him. In an opinion issued in early March, the office admitted that the central allegation in Moraes’ order had been largely refuted. The Attorney General’s Office recommended again this week that Martins be released because “there is no indication” that he attempted to flee the country, the original justification for his arrest.
The principle that a citizen can only be arrested after it has been proven, in a fair trial, that he or she has committed a crime is fundamental to any free society. This is the premise that underpinned the Vaza Jato reports in The Intercept and the same one that led the Supreme Court to overturn Lula’s convictions by Sergio Moro.
Detention without a fair trial is one of the most serious acts a State can commit. There are very limited and rare circumstances in which this may occur. Pre-trial detention is an “exceptional measure” and is justified only to “prevent situations that could jeopardize a fair judicial outcome”—for example, when an accused person may obstruct an investigation or poses a high risk of fleeing the country.
One of the most common criticisms of Lava Jato was precisely that Moro radically expanded the use of preventive detention, imposing many months of imprisonment on several defendants before any trial. The former judge sought to coerce prisoners into making statements or other illegitimate political objectives.
This complaint has been made by Gilmar Mendes, as well as by many legal experts. Ironically, Moraes, both in the Martins case and more broadly, “has resorted to a legal instrument that became popular during the height of the[Lava Jato]operation and was the target of challenges by members of the Supreme Court: extensive preventive detentions.”
In Martins’ case, Moraes justified the arrest based on the claim that the former aide had left Brazil “on board the presidential plane on 12/30/2022 bound for Orlando/USA”. In October 2023, a Metrópoles columnist wrongly stated that Martins left Brasília, “went to Orlando in 2022 and disappeared”. This claim by the columnist was cited by the Federal Police and used by Moraes to conclude that Martins presented a flight risk.
However, it was clear from the beginning that this claim was completely false. For this reason, Metrópoles finally inserted a large and lengthy correction to its original article in June, admitting that its central claim was unfounded. The correction published on the website acknowledges that “Martins provided information to the Supreme Court that showed that he was in Brazil on that date.” He was never on the plane and did not enter the US in December.
This was not a complex misunderstanding. It is unequivocally clear that Martins did not evaporate or leave Brazil on the presidential plane with Bolsonaro, as Moraes claimed.
He was in Brazil the whole time: Latam confirmed that the former advisor traveled to Curitiba on a company flight on December 31, 2022. Receipts from iFood and Uber attest to Martins’ presence in Brazil during the period. As reported by Folha, “geolocation data from Filipe Martins’ cell phone (…) show that the device was in Brazil between December 30, 2022 and January 9, 2023.”
In January 2023, the current government responded to a request for access to information that asked for “the full list of those who traveled on the aforementioned FAB flight (which took Bolsonaro to Orlando on December 30, 2022).” The official response includes ten names, in addition to Jair Bolsonaro and his wife, Michelle. Filipe Martins is not listed.
It was this body of evidence that led the Attorney General’s Office to twice recommend Martins’ immediate release. Moraes, apparently eager to keep Martins imprisoned under harsh conditions, ignored all this evidence and in May rejected a request for the former aide’s release.
With even more evidence emerging, the PGR once again spoke out in favor of Martins’ release this week. It did so, in the words of the attorney general, to “reinforce the request for Martins’ release because there is no indication that the defendant attempted to flee Brazil in late 2022.”
As with all citizens, Filipe Martins should be punished if proven in a fair trial that he committed a crime. But he has never been charged with committing crimes, much less convicted of them. It has long been clear that the basis for Alexandre de Moraes’s pre-trial arrest warrant for Martins is false.
Martins has been in prison for nearly six months based on a false allegation. It is high time he was released.
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