The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (ICC) on the pandemic in Brazil on Tuesday evening approved the damning report, the result of six months of investigation, which recommends the indictment of President Jair Bolsonaro for nine crimes, including that of “crime against the humanity ”.
After dozens of hearings, often poignant, the ICC accused the government of having “deliberately exposed” Brazilians to “mass contamination”.
Seven of the 11 senators who carried out the work of the commission approved in the evening the text of nearly 1,200 pages which calls for the indictment of the president for, in particular, “crime against humanity”, “prevarication”, “charlatanism” and ” incitement to crime ”.
Following the vote, senators observed a minute of silence in tribute to the more than 606,000 Brazilians who have died from COVID-19.
The text, which was presented by rapporteur Renan Calheiros last week, also recommends the indictment of some 80 people, including several ministers, ex-ministers, companies, and the three eldest sons of Bolsonaro, all elected officials.
The ICC being unable to go further, its report will be sent to the prosecution, which has sole jurisdiction to indict the people it has incriminated.
But in the case of Jair Bolsonaro, specialists deem an indictment unlikely, since it is the responsibility of the Attorney General, Augusto Aras, an ally of the president.
However, the “crime against humanity” could be tried at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
“Intentional” crimes
The Brazilian president, who positions himself as an anti-vaccine, anti-sanitary passport and whose popularity rating is at its lowest, said last week “guilty of absolutely nothing”. “We know we did the right thing from the start,” he said.
The charges of the ICC should therefore have a mostly symbolic scope for the time being, Jair Bolsonaro also benefiting from support in Parliament able to prevent him from being dismissed.
But for the ICC, these crimes are “intentional”, the government having deliberately decided not to take the necessary measures against the coronavirus, hoping that the population achieves “collective immunity”, a strategy “at high risk”.
The ICC in particular denounced the “deliberate delay” in the acquisition of vaccines, the government having preferred to promote ineffective treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, with “tragic consequences” for the population.
The ICC has also investigated government responsibility for the oxygen shortage that has killed dozens of patients in Manaus, and the relationship between Brasilia and private health mutuals.
One of them, Prevent Senior, is suspected of having carried out, without the knowledge of her patients, experiments with early treatments and of having pressured her doctors to prescribe them to “human guinea pigs”.
COVID and AIDS
In the morning, the 11 senators of the ICC had asked the Supreme Court and the prosecution to suspend the president’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts “until further notice”, after he associated the vaccine against COVID-19 AIDS, in a video posted last week on social media.
The political scientist Mauricio Santoro said to AFP, “skeptical” about such an eventuality. “If we base ourselves on the example of [l’ancien président américain Donald] Trump, it would take something very serious, like the invasion of Capitol Hill ”for Mr. Bolsonaro to be kicked out of Twitter and Facebook, he said.
The ICC also demanded that Jair Bolsonaro “retract on a national channel concerning the correlation between the COVID vaccine and AIDS contamination”, on pain of a fine of 50,000 reais (over 11,000 Canadian dollars).
“We can no longer tolerate this type of behavior”, wrote the senators, also calling for the blocking of the president’s access to his accounts in order to “avoid the destruction of evidence”.
On Monday, the YouTube video platform suspended the activities of the president’s channel for a week, after removing the video, as did Facebook and Instagram.
Since coming to power in 2019, Jair Bolsonaro, whose most communication takes place on social networks where he has more than 40 million subscribers, has regularly disseminated erroneous information, much of it on the coronavirus.