The Federal Supreme Court (STF) decided, this Thursday (15), to impose restrictions on the decree signed by President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) that deals with the sharing of citizen data between public government agencies.
The ministers analyzed two actions that questioned the decree that created the Citizen’s Base Registry (with the function of gathering information in different bodies of the public administration) and the Central Data Governance Committee (which defines which databases will integrate the registry created ).
Most ministers followed the rapporteur of the case, minister Gilmar Mendes, who was partially favorable to the actions, but did not declare the decree totally unconstitutional. The dean of the STF voted in the sense that this data sharing follows principles and restrictions established by the General Law for the Protection of Personal Data (LGPD).
This understanding, in practice, will restrict the possibilities of access, sharing and use of citizens’ data by public bodies.
By the vote of minister Gilmar Mendes, the decision of the STF will be valid 60 days after the publication of the judgment minutes, in order to give the government a deadline to adapt to the new rule.
Ministers Luís Roberto Barroso, Alexandre de Moraes, Luiz Fux, Dias Toffoli, Cármen Lúcia, Ricardo Lewandowski and Rosa Weber accompanied the rapporteur.
In a way, Justice Edson Fachin (who voted to declare the presidential decree totally unconstitutional) and Justices André Mendonça and Nunes Marques (who voted that the deadline for the adequacy of by the public administration was until December 31, 2022).
The rapporteur of the actions, minister Gilmar Mendes, argued, after Fachin’s vote, that he considered voting for the total unconstitutionality of the decree, but that he came to the conclusion that this understanding could cause a legal “vacuum”.
“In the process of building this decision, I flirted with the declaration of unconstitutionality without pronouncement of nullity, the idea of leaving the law, the norm, of the normative complex of the decree in force, and then returning the execution to the Executive within a deadline. But we already have experience in this regard, including the impasses that can occur if there is no action.
The simple eventual declaration of nullity, which is not what your Excellency proposes, would lead to a vacuum and even to that case of an even more unconstitutional situation, because we already have those verified and we would not have parameters. That’s why it seemed safer to me to choose the interpretation according to the fact that we extracted from the legislative framework itself, especially from the LGPD, the interpretation that should guide”, explained Gilmar.
The actions were presented by the Federal Council of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) and the PSB, which allege that sharing is a kind of massive surveillance of citizens.
According to the authors of the action, this sharing can reach up to 76 million people who may have information shared with the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin).
Source: CNN Brasil
