Brazil’s Bolsonaro pardons ally convicted of hate speech

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has gone head-to-head with the judiciary once more, awarding a pardon to a political friend convicted to prison for undermining democratic institutions late Thursday.

Prompting opposition protests of executive overreach, the far-right president pardoned lawmaker Daniel Silveira just a day after his hate speech conviction for calling for the Supreme Court to be overthrown.

The center-left Rede party on Friday filed a petition to the Supreme Court to annul Bolsonaro’s decree, published in the government gazette, which it deemed “unconstitutional.”

Late Thursday, in his weekly Facebook address, Bolsonaro said he had pardoned Silveira, a former policeman, “in the name of freedom of expression, an essential pillar of our society.”

Silveira, 39, was arrested in February 2021 for allegedly plotting “acts aimed at harming (the Supreme Court) and the democratic rule of law.”

This came after he posted a video online defending Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship — which Bolsonaro often praises despite its record of human-rights violations — and said the Supreme Court’s judges deserved “a thrashing.”

The video was part of an ongoing campaign against the court by Bolsonaro supporters and allies.

Hardline backers of the far-right president claim the court and Congress are conspiring to block his agenda, and have called for both to be dissolved.

A month ago, Silveira barricaded himself inside Congress to fight a judge’s order for him to be fitted with an ankle monitor, before finally agreeing to wear the tracking device pending judgment in his trial.

That came Wednesday, when a majority of Supreme Court judges sentenced Silveira to eight years and nine months in prison and ordered that he be stripped of his parliamentary seat.

“The constitution does not allow freedom of expression to be used as a shield for hate speech and attacks against institutions,” judge Alexandre de Moraes said in his reasoning.

Political commentators say there have been very few individual pardons such as the one granted to Silveira since the constitution entered into force in 1988.

They are usually granted in a collective manner, around Christmas, to prisoners approaching the end of their sentences.

After his election in 2018, Bolsonaro had promised to do away with presidential pardons altogether.

Highly unpopular, according to opinion polls, Bolsonaro will be seeking reelection on October.

He’s had a tumultuous relationship with the Supreme Court, which has ordered many investigations into the president, including one into misleading information dissemination.