Rousseff challenges impeachment in court
The government of Dilma Rousseff launched a last-ditch bid to avert an important vote on the president’s impeachment on Sunday by challenging the measure in the Supreme Court.
The attorney-general José Eduardo Cardozo, who is leading Ms Rousseff’s defence, said there were procedural flaws in the impeachment process that rendered it illegal.
“The attorney-general’s office has entered with an injunction in the Supreme Court to annul the process of impeachment,” Mr Cardozo’s office said in a Twitter message.
Deeply unpopular and facing Brazil’s worst economic recession in more than a century, Ms Rousseff is in eleventh hour talks to persuade her remaining allies in congress to vote against Sunday’s impeachment motion.
The challenge in the Supreme Court, which was expected, is a tactical move designed to try to delay the impeachment process and steal some of the momentum from the opposition, analysts said.
“According to the petition from the AGU [attorney-general’s office], the process [of impeachment] contains errors that impede its continuation,” the attorney-general’s office said in a statement.
It said a special committee that prepared a report for congress on the impeachment considered matters that were not relevant to the process.
This included subjects that did not relate to Ms Rousseff`s current mandate and testimony from a scandal dogging Petrobras, the state-run oil company, that had nothing to do with her handling of the budget.
This had turned the impeachment process into a “true Kafkaesque trial in which the defendant can never ascertain exactly of what he is being accused,” it said.
Some people close to the pro-impeachment camp, which is led by the centrist PMDB, until recently Ms Rousseff’s main coalition partner, and the PSDB, the main opposition party, say they already have the votes needed for victory.
A two-thirds majority of the 513-seat lower house of congress, or 342 lawmakers, must approve the motion, which would then go to the senate.
If accepted in the senate by a simple majority, the formal impeachment process — essentially a political trial — would begin during which Ms Rousseff would be suspended and her vice-president Michel Temer become acting president. If she was impeached, Mr Temer would take office until the next elections in 2018.
The pro-impeachment camp is basing the impeachment action on allegations that Ms Rousseff fiddled the national accounts to hide the true state of the budget deficit.
She contests the charges and argues that they are insufficient to justify her removal, calling the impeachment process a coup being orchestrated by the opposition, conservative media and partisan police, prosecutors and judges.
But impeachment is supported by a large part of the population who are angry at the president over her handling of the economy and the vast corruption scandal at Petrobras, of which she was once chairman.