TJ president vows no delays in Witzel impeachment ruling Thursday

Rio de Janeiro's highest court president sat down this week with a single, urgent message: Thursday's hearing would move forward without delay, without politics, and without compromise. Desembargador Cláudio de Mello Tavares, who presides over both the state's Court of Justice and the special mixed tribunal that would decide Wilson Witzel's fate, spoke to the weight of what was about to unfold—a trial unprecedented in the state's history, one that would determine whether an impeachment proceeding against the suspended governor could advance to its final, potentially devastating phase.

Witzel has been suspended from office since July, caught in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors investigating corruption in the state health system. The mixed tribunal—ten people total, five state deputies and five judges—would vote Thursday on whether to accept the formal charges against him. It was, in Tavares's framing, a moment the state itself was waiting for. "The society expects a response to this judgment," he said. He had spent the entire weekend reading through the case files, hundreds of pages of evidence and argument, preparing for what could stretch into a marathon session. In neighboring Santa Catarina, a similar tribunal had voted for seventeen hours straight.

Tavares was explicit about what he would not tolerate: delay tactics dressed up as legal procedure. "What I will not admit is procrastination," he told the newspaper. He acknowledged that both the prosecution and Witzel's defense would present evidence, but only what was truly necessary. Dilatory motions, manufactured complications, the thousand small ways a trial can be stretched—none of that would happen on his watch. The state was struggling. People needed resolution. The constitution itself demanded it.

The judge also moved to preempt the most corrosive accusation that could follow: that this was a political trial wearing a judicial robe. He insisted there would be no external interference, no hidden agendas among the ten jurors who had been randomly selected. "There is not the slightest possibility this will be a political judgment," he said. He believed in the integrity of every person who would cast a vote. What mattered was the law, the evidence, the constitutional mandates observed with rigor. Nothing else.

If the tribunal voted to accept the charges on Thursday—which required only a simple majority of six votes—the case would enter an instruction phase. Witnesses would be called. Documents would be analyzed. The entire record would be examined in detail. Tavares estimated, based on his experience, that if no complex forensic analysis was needed, the full trial could conclude by early January 2021. But that was conditional. That was a best case.

The hearing itself would follow a precise choreography. A state deputy named Waldeck Carneiro would read a 128-page report. The prosecution and defense would each have fifteen minutes to speak. Then the ten tribunal members would debate and vote, alternating between judges and deputies. Tavares suggested it might not consume the full seventeen hours that Santa Catarina's tribunal had needed. Everyone had received all the materials in advance. Everyone would be prepared. "If everything goes as expected," he said, "it won't last more than fifteen hours."

What hung over Thursday was not just Witzel's immediate fate—whether the charges would be allowed to proceed—but the shape of the months ahead. If convicted in the final vote, which would require seven of the ten votes, Witzel faced cassation of his mandate and a five-year loss of political rights. He would be finished as a political actor in Rio. But that final reckoning was months away. Thursday was only the first gate. Thursday was about whether the trial itself would happen at all.

Witzel, a former judge himself, had denied the corruption allegations in his defense, blaming his former health secretary and subsecretaries for any wrongdoing. He also faced a separate challenge in the Supreme Court, where his lawyers were contesting the procedural rules under which the mixed tribunal had been formed. That decision was due by mid-November. So Thursday was not the end of anything. It was the beginning of a cascade of judgments, each one narrowing the space where Witzel could maneuver, each one moving him closer to either vindication or ruin.