Fachin and Dino Turn STF Procedure Into a Public Clash

Fachin and Dino Turn STF Procedure Into a Public Clash
The exchange unfolded on Tuesday during a hearing examining a Federal Police report involving Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Banco Master. Dias Toffoli was explaining why he had declared himself unable to hear the matter when Dino sought to intervene, prompting Fachin to set out his reading of the court’s procedure.

Fachin’s position was that requests to speak should pass through the court president. “I would like to agree, in this session, that the floor will always be requested from the presidency,” he said, citing Article 133 of the internal rules. The provision says that no one may speak without the president’s authorization or interrupt the person speaking, except for asides that are requested and granted.

Dino offered a different interpretation: an aparte—an aside or interruption—should be addressed directly to the justice holding the floor. “The aside is addressed to the person who has the floor,” Dino said, adding that the rule could be changed in future but remained in force as written. Gilmar Mendes, the court’s longest-serving justice, aligned with Dino, saying his understanding over more than two decades at the STF had been that “the person who grants the aside is the person who has the floor.”

The accounts agree on the central procedural divide and on Mendes’s support for Dino. They differ mainly in emphasis: the report published in the right-leaning outlet foregrounded Fachin’s reprimand and his invocation of the rules, while the left-leaning account portrayed the moment as an exchange of ironies and noted Dino’s later request for permission to speak while Mendes was talking.

Outside the court, commentator Rodrigo Constantino criticized Fachin’s handling of the exchange, writing that the chief justice lacked “a minimum of firmness” and asking how he could allow himself to be “humiliated” by Dino.

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