BRASILIA – The Presidency of the Republic has imposed secrecy on the letter sent by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In March, Lula sent a letter to the Russian president congratulating him on his re-election. The full content of the letter was not made public at the time and now the Lula government has decided to apply an even more restrictive rule to the document.
The Civil House of the Presidency of the Republic denied a request based on the Access to Information Law, dated March 20 of this year. The government argued that the “secrecy of correspondence” about the content of the letter is based on “protecting the private life and intimacy” of the president. According to the Planalto Palace, the document was addressed to Putin by “citizen” Lula.
Contrary to this decision on Putin, Lula himself said this week that he would release the content of the third letter sent to him by the president of Argentina, Javier Milei. Lula and his party invest in a friendly relationship with Putin – which is not the case with Milei (read more below).
“The fundamental right to the secrecy of correspondence can be invoked when necessary for the protection of the private life and intimacy of the President of the Republic,” said the federal government. “We clarify that the document requested refers to correspondence of the citizen occupying the position of President of the Republic and is therefore protected from disclosure to third parties.”
The Planalto did not specify the duration of the secrecy, after which the letter could be made public. Officials who have analyzed similar requests understand that letters interpreted as having a personal bias can be kept secret for 100 years – unless there is express consent for disclosure by the sender or recipient.
Letters exchanged by the president are processed and dealt with by the Personal Office of the President of the Republic. The agency is currently responsible for analyzing each case on a case-by-case basis, but the Chief of Staff’s Office was in charge of responding based on information provided by the personal office. There has been an appeal for the decision to be reconsidered.
The Civil House applied a restrictive precedent to the case, based on a request analyzed last year by the National Secretariat for Access to Information of the Comptroller General of the Union (CGU). The Lula government claimed that the cases are “identical”, although there are differences between the situations.
The request denied on April 16 asks for access to “the full text of the letter sent by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, on the occasion of the Russian leader’s re-election in March 2024″. This is a specific written communication from one head of state to another, sent by the PT president in his capacity as president and motivated by a matter of public interest – the outcome of elections in Russia. These communications go through government bureaucracies, usually through diplomatic channels and presidential palaces.
The previous request, made on January 18, 2023, aimed to consult “copies of letters received by President Lula’s office from ordinary Brazilians and authorities between January 1 and January 18, 2022 (sic)″. According to the CGU, the requesting citizen made a mistake when registering the year and was actually asking for the letters received by Lula when he was newly sworn into office, in the first eighteen days of last year. The request covered letters in general, written by any sender to Lula, whether by physical mail (Post Office) or electronic mail (messages and e-mails).
In its negative response, the Civil House cited Opinion No. 00025/2023 from the Federal Attorney General’s Office, which analyzed the request for letters sent to Lula in January 2023. The CGU, however, applied a broader prohibition to the case, which covers the entire period in office and imposes secrecy generically, in principle, on all presidential correspondence.
“Considering the interpersonal relationships that the president maintains on a daily basis, even if they are correspondence with national or foreign authorities and even if they arise from the exercise of his office, they still deserve the protection of the rights to intimacy and privacy, ensured through the fundamental guarantee of the inviolability of correspondence and communications,” says an excerpt from the opinion of the Office of the General Counsel of the Union, part of the Office of the Attorney General of the Union, reproduced by the Civil House.
Last year, the government also said that “textual messages addressed to the president are protected by inviolability, under the terms of art. 5, item XII of the Federal Constitution”. The Planalto also considered that “any disclosure of their content would violate the guarantees of protection of the senders’ personal data”.
Controversy and decision changes
The Presidency’s denial was re-evaluated in three instances, two at the Civil House and one at the CGU, and was temporarily reversed. On May 23, 2023, the Comptroller’s Office ordered the Civil House to open within 30 days the consultation of “official correspondence sent to President Lula by national or foreign authorities between January 1 and January 18, 2022”.
Responsible for the decision, the national secretary for Access to Information, Ana Túlia de Macedo, imposed a condition: sensitive information or personal data could be “tarred”, a way of protecting them without making it impossible to disclose the full content when it is in the public interest. The procedure was not considered in the current request.
The Civil House protested and managed to get the deadline suspended. On December 29, Ana Túlia de Macedo returned to the January 2023 request to register a change in her final interpretation. The national secretary went on to adopt the more restrictive opinion and accepted the Civil House’s appeal, overturning the access to Lula’s post-possession letters that she herself had already granted.
This change in her decision, classified as a “revised response”, was only published on the government system on April 4, 2024, a fortnight after the request to see Lula’s letter to Putin.
Exception to transparency
The CGU itself considered the case of presidential letters to be an “exception to the principle of transparency”. The issue is controversial and was the subject of debate among specialized officials, who had conflicting interpretations. At the heart of the issue was the need to differentiate between personal correspondence, which could be classified for 100 years, and official correspondence, which relates to “the duties of the position held by the authority in question”, and which is in the public interest and can be disclosed.
In the end, the interpretation was that the exercise of the office of the President of the Republic has “peculiarities” which, according to the CGU’s legal advisors, make it difficult to “rigidly segregate the interpersonal relationships maintained in the President’s private and public life, consequently also affecting the correspondence and other communications that take place within the scope of these relationships”. The decision now depends on the president’s personal office analyzing the content of each letter.
“In view of the singularities of the presidency already mentioned, the circumstances of the correspondence involving a national or foreign public authority, or even the fact that it was received through a protocol service in a public body, are not capable of automatically characterizing it as belonging to the public patrimony, and the hypothesis of invoking the aforementioned constitutional guarantee must first be ruled out, after the content of the correspondence has been examined by the Personal Office of the Presidency of the Republic,” the consultants said in their opinion. “In this way, it must first be analyzed whether the correspondence falls within the scope of the secrecy described, so that later, if it does not, it can become part of the public collection of documents, and not the other way around, otherwise any and all correspondence addressed to the President of the Republic since his investiture in office could be understood as public or official because it arises from the exercise of this relevant function, drastically reducing the spectrum of protection of the constitutional guarantee whose essential core must be preserved.”
Milei’s letter
The government’s decision is at odds with Lula’s public statements about letters exchanged between presidents. On Tuesday 23rd, Lula said he was interested in making public the content of a letter sent to him by the president of Argentina, Javier Milei. “After I’ve read it, I’m interested in the press knowing what the president of Argentina wants to talk about with Brazil,” he said at a breakfast with journalists.
A week after receiving the letter from his political rival and now president of the neighboring country, Lula said that he had not yet read the Argentinian’s letter. Milei’s letter was handed to Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira by Chancellor Diana Mondino, Milei’s first representative to make an official visit to Brasilia. Diplomats say that Milei refers in the letter to a meeting with Lula, in a generic way, without giving a date.
In past governments, including Lula’s current and previous terms, the government used to publish the content of letters addressed to the president. They were the subject of press reports published by various newspapers, including Estadão.
PT letter and relationship with Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin won 87.3% of the vote in March and secured his fifth six-year term in office. He will remain in power until at least 2030, becoming the longest-serving Russian leader since dictator Josef Stalin. The election took place in a Kremlin-controlled environment, with the persecution and imprisonment of opponents and restrictions on the press. Putin had no real opponents. The victory was contested internationally.
The PT also sent a note of “greetings” on behalf of the party, signed by its International Relations Secretary, Romênio Pereira, who traveled to Moscow. Romênio said that he had followed the vote with “great interest” and congratulated the United Russia party on the “expressive result”. He called the victory a “historic achievement” and expressed “commitment to strengthening our bonds of partnership and friendship, working together towards a fairer, more multilateral and pluralistic world”. The statement was addressed to former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, who is now vice-president of the Russian Security Council.
Also in March, the president said that he was not obliged to deal with Putin with the same “nervousness” as the Europeans, because he was far away from the war in Ukraine. “I’m so many thousand kilometers away from Ukraine that I’m not obliged to have the same nervousness as the French people, who are closer, the German people, the European people,” said Lula. “The two two-eyed men are going to have to get along,” he added, referring to Putin and Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski.
Lula’s statement adds to others that have sounded pro-Russia in their approach to the conflict. The Brazilian president has already said that the two countries had similar responsibilities, despite the fact that the Russians unilaterally invaded the neighboring country two years ago, and even speculated that Ukraine would cede Crimea, taken by force in 2014 by Russian troops, in order to end the war. The proposal resonated badly in Europe and was promptly rejected by Zelenski.
The president insists that Brazil has not taken sides, and defends peace negotiations between Kiev and Moscow. He calls himself a “pacifist”.
This week, Lula once again dispatched former Chancellor Celso Amorim, his special adviser on international affairs and main foreign policy maker, to Moscow. The president plans to visit Kazan, Russia, and meet Putin in October during the BRICS summit. Putin could then come to Brazil for the G-20, but the Kremlin wants guarantees.
Lula had already said that Putin would be welcome in Brazil, even though he has an outstanding arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes. Lula even suggested that Putin would not be arrested, but then backed down and said that the decision was up to the courts. Even so, members of his government have said that the Russian has certain immunities because he is head of state.
“I met Putin at the G-7, the G-20, the UN. We are part of various international organizations in which you have the heterogeneous participation of many countries, many people that you don’t agree with, but are part of,” Lula argued in March. “It’s part of the democratic process to live together democratically in adversity. These are not forums of equals, they are forums of states, of countries, and we have to respect everyone’s right to do what they want in their own country, criticizing what they don’t agree with.”
The government has endorsed the idea of immunity for heads of state, which could pave the way for the presence of the Russian president in Brazil. As Brazil is part of the ICC treaty, in theory it should comply with the order to arrest Putin, but the government is opposed to the idea.
The Lula government’s position is set out in a document sent to the United Nations. Brazil argues that ICC arrest warrants should only apply to countries that are part of the treaty, as well as representatives of those countries. Russia even signed up to the founding of the Court in 2000, but withdrew its participation in 2016 because of the court’s protests over the invasion of Crimea in 2014.
Politically, the possibility of Putin’s arrest in Brazil is considered remote, because of the geopolitical and diplomatic implications of arresting the leader of the second largest military power on the planet, which has nuclear weapons and is directly involved in a war.
Note: “Petista” is a term used in Brazil to refer to a person who is a supporter or sympathizer of the Workers’ Party (PT). The PT is a Brazilian political party founded in 1980, known for its left-wing and labor policies. The term “petista” can be used both as an adjective and as a noun. In addition, the term “petista” can also be used pejoratively to refer to people who are perceived as unconditional supporters of the PT, regardless of its policies or actions.
*** Translated by DEFCONPress FYI Team ***