The judgment of the new legal framework for basic sanitation in the STF was suspended this Thursday (25) because of the schedule, and will resume next Wednesday (1st) with the conclusion of the vote of Minister Nunes Marques, the second to vote . The president of the Supreme Court, Minister Luiz Fux, voted against the four actions that question the provisions of the new framework.
With this, the minister’s vote is to maintain the law that establishes the new legislation, approved by the National Congress last year.
Fux is the rapporteur of four processes presented to the STF questioning the new law aimed at sanitation: one, presented by the PDT; another, by PCdoB, Psol, PSB and PT; a third, from the National Association of Municipal Sanitation Services; and, finally, that of the Brazilian Association of State Sanitation Companies.
The authors ask that some provisions of the new legal framework for basic sanitation be declared unconstitutional.
In his vote read on Thursday (25), Minister Luiz Fux stated that “data collected between 2017 and 2020 reveal failures in access and capillarity in the Brazilian basic sanitation policy”.
“Although the program contract was the vector of an initially successful process in expanding access to sanitation, the Ministry of Regional Development, based on the monitoring of historical series of results, alarmed about the situation of lag and inefficiency”, justified the minister, referring to the so-called program contract.
The instrument allows municipalities to transfer the execution of certain services to another federative entity. In the case of basic sanitation, which is provided, in most parts of the country, by state companies, it is signed between the municipality and the company.
The New Basic Sanitation Framework established that the municipality can no longer enter into an agreement directly with the public company. Competition, which makes room for private companies to enter the market, has become the norm.
According to the minister, it appears that “water distribution, sewage treatment and solid waste management require support in infrastructure facilities of considerable sophistication and magnitude, together with the necessary contribution of the human factor to its operational execution” .
In August 2020, Fux had already denied a request for an injunction (provisional) against the law of the New Legal Framework for Basic Sanitation. At the time, Fux considered that there was no danger of delay or plausibility of the right that would justify the granting of an injunction.
what the authors ask
In one of the actions, for example, the PDT alleges that provisions of the legal framework can create a monopoly of the private sector in water supply and sanitary sewage services.
The party states that “the new law provides for the possibility of exploration by blocks, where there would be areas of greater and lesser economic interest jointly auctioned, the company that wins the event has to assume the universalization targets in the entire area.”
“However, assuming the commitment is not enough to believe that the private sector or public company will be able to explore these regions efficiently and without charging excessive tariffs as a way to compensate for the investment in cities with little infrastructure to receive the service, for example” , argues.
“The need for subsidies in the sanitation sector is undeniable. The stormy issue brought about by the new legislation is that there are no incentives to induce private companies to serve the poorest, noting that these companies want to maximize profit”, he adds.
In another case, PT, PSol, PCdoB and PSB claimed that the law that changed the legal framework for sanitation represents a risk of imminent damage to the public administration’s duty to offer everyone access to essential goods in accordance with the principle of universality of services public.
The National Association of Municipal Sanitation Services argues in its action that the new legal framework represents an imposition by the Union on the autonomy of municipalities. The association also says that the law would transform basic sanitation into a business counter, excluding the poor and marginalized population.
Finally, the Brazilian Association of State Sanitation Companies claimed to the STF that the new framework, through the end of the program contracts, ends the shared management of the basic sanitation service by a public consortium or cooperation agreement, imposing the concession as only model of delegating the service.
Reference: CNN Brasil
