The impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on the Brazilian legal system – a report on the functioning of the branches of the government and on the legal scrutiny of their activities

ABSTRACT The article aims to describe and examine the different responses to the current Covid-19 crisis taken by the top offices of political Branches in Brazil: federal executive, National Congress and the Supreme Court. The article will show that state-level officials took most public health actions in Brazil, what gave rise to a clash between the President and Governors about who has authority to decide about public health measures. The federal executive, so far, has been more concerned with the economic responses to the imminent mass unemployment and household crisis. The National Congress has adapted its deliberation operations moving to a ‘remote deliberation system’, with extremely short deadlines and not exclusively related to covid-19 issues. In practice, this has made almost daily debate and deliberation on both Chambers Floor possible about dozens of measures, which will be briefly described in the paper. Notwithstanding the unprecedented technological innovation, there is still room for improvement. The Brazilian Supreme Court has also taken important decisions in the current situation. The decisions restricted the federal executive authority to deal with the crisis: the Court ruled that Federal Law n° 13.979/2020 cannot restrain state and municipal authorities from adopting public health policies against the virus spreading; the federal executive cannot reduce the publicity of administrative acts during the crisis and it is prohibited from instructing or advertising the population against scientifically agreed measures as quarantines and shutdowns. This background shows that the responses to the coronavirus crisis in Brazil have been fragmented and institutionally disperse. One cannot point out a single, exclusive institution responsible for the public health responses to the current crisis in Brazil.