By Akracia – Fenikso Nigra
The Banco Master scandal revealed how capital, politics, and judicial power intertwine in Brazil. Contracts worth 129 million reais between the bank and a law firm linked to a Supreme Federal Court minister, trips on private jets with lawyers of those under investigation, relatives involved in suspicious business. This case is not just an isolated legal failure but a symptom of a social organization in which decisions about collective resources remain in the hands of closed structures that escape direct population control.
The institutional reaction came quickly. In February 2026, Supreme Court president Edson Fachin announced the drafting of a Code of Ethics for ministers in response to criticism about conflicts of interest. The initiative met strong internal resistance. During a plenary session on February 4, ministers Alexandre de Moraes and Dias Toffoli publicly defended that magistrates can receive payment for lectures, be company shareholders, and maintain farms as long as they do not exercise administrative functions. Moraes classified criticism of these practices as manifestations of bad faith. Toffoli argued that requiring renunciation of these income sources would amount to confiscation of family inheritances. Hours later, Fachin canceled a scheduled meeting to discuss the code.
This resistance indicates something greater than disagreement about rules. It reveals how judicial authority is institutionally isolated from the society it supposedly should serve. The structural problem appears clearly: how to create a code of ethics to correct behaviors in an institution whose composition process is already born flawed? Supreme Federal Court ministers do not reach the Court through public examinations based on technical knowledge. They are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, an eminently political process where legal capacity is only one factor, frequently secondary to ideological alignments and party commitments.
Recent history demonstrates this political nature of appointments. Governments use Supreme Court seats to build alliances, reward support, ensure favorable votes on sensitive issues. Ministers arrive at the Court owing political loyalties, carrying commitments assumed during indication processes. Pretending that these people, once sworn in, transform into neutral arbiters through a code of ethics is to ignore the concrete conditions that sustain their presence in the institution.
The difference between legal and moral runs through the entire discussion. Legally, ministers can receive payment for lectures, maintain investments, have relatives practicing law in various cases. The Organic Law of the Magistrature allows these practices as long as there is no exercise of administrative functions. However, social morality goes beyond formal legality. When a minister’s spouse maintains a million-real contract with a bank under investigation, when a rapporteur’s relatives appear in businesses linked to the scheme, when a minister travels on a private jet with a lawyer of someone under investigation, an appearance of partiality is created that undermines public trust regardless of specific legal violations.
A fundamental anarchist critique is that ethics is not something imposed from above with a conduct manual. Ethics is community practice, built in concrete social relationships among people who share the consequences of their decisions. As long as the Supreme continues operating as a leadership protected by internal norms and political ties, any code will function more as a legitimation instrument than as real change. Abstract norms do not alter, by themselves, the material power relations that shape judicial decisions.
The code of ethics proposal functions as an institutional escape valve. Faced with a scandal that threatens the Court’s legitimacy, a response is offered that appears rigorous without altering structures. A code can prohibit paid lectures above a certain value, require periodic declarations of ties, establish quarantine periods for certain activities. But it will not change the fact that people chosen by political criteria, often representing specific interests, occupy positions that would require impossible impartiality.
Historical experiences in various parts of the world demonstrate alternative forms of organizing justice. In many indigenous societies of the Americas, decisions about conflicts and norms are not made by separate judicial figures but by deliberative processes in which the entire community participates directly. There is no judge distant from social life, but known people who respond directly to those affected by their decisions. Mediators can be revoked, practices adapted according to concrete needs. These models are not based on abstract codes but on living social relationships that recognize plurality of voices, local context, and direct responsibility.
Community justice systems in Bolivia, constitutionally recognized, allow indigenous peoples to resolve disputes according to their own traditions, with arbiters chosen by the community and subject to revocation. During the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939, regions under libertarian control organized popular tribunals where judges were temporarily elected, could be revoked, and decided cases with direct participation of representatives from the affected community.
In Brazil, community justice practices in favelas and peripheries demonstrate that when people organize conflict resolution processes with local knowledge, results can be more effective than distant mechanisms that claim neutrality. Community mediators know the people involved, understand specific contexts, seek solutions that restore coexistence, not just apply abstract rules. These practices are not romanticization but social autonomy occupying spaces left empty by the State, reclaiming direct participation in decisions that concern the people themselves.
Various anarchist strands question not only specific behaviors of magistrates but the very existence of a judiciary separate from society, composed of people who accumulate material privileges while judging conflicts of those living completely different realities. The central question is not whether ministers can have farms or shares, but why decisions about freedom, property, and fundamental rights are concentrated in eleven people chosen through opaque political processes.
The Banco Master case reveals deeper patterns that a code of ethics will address only superficially. It shows how proximity between political, economic, and judicial power is not exceptional deviation but normal functioning. The bank’s controller did not build an influence network through extraordinary individual skill but because the system allows and encourages these connections. Ministers who reach the Supreme through political negotiations naturally maintain ties with those who appointed them and with the interests they represent.
The practical response to crises like this cannot be merely normative. It is necessary to support and strengthen forms of social organization that decentralize decision-making power, promote community transparency, and allow people affected by decisions to have an active voice in their formulation and revision. Systematically expose conflicts of interest, demand total transparency about magistrates’ economic ties, support community justice initiatives that build concrete alternatives to the hierarchical system.
The code of ethics, if eventually approved against internal resistance, will function as a symbolic patch. It may restrict some more scandalous practices, create formal protocols for declaring interests, establish mild penalties for evident violations. But it will not alter the fact that ministers will continue arriving at the Supreme through political appointment, maintaining ties with those who nominated them, judging questions where they have direct or indirect material interests, protected by lifetime tenure that isolates them from consequences.
The discussion about morality in the Supreme needs to go beyond individual behaviors to examine structures that systematically produce these problems. As long as Court seats are political bargaining chips, as long as ministers can accumulate wealth through external activities facilitated by their position, as long as there are no real accountability mechanisms, codes of ethics will primarily serve to temporarily calm public outrage. Ethics must cease being institutional rhetoric and become practice lived by all, built in relationships of horizontality and mutual responsibility.
In struggle, we are dignified and free people!
