The Presidency of the Republic decided to impose secrecy on the letter sent by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. In March, Lula sent a letter congratulating Putin on his re-election. However, the full content of the letter was not disclosed at the time, and now the Lula government has chosen 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 justified that the “secrecy of correspondence” in relation to the content of the letter aims to “protect the private life and intimacy” of the president. According to Palácio do Planalto, the letter was sent to Putin by “citizen” Lula.
Interestingly, Lula recently announced that he would disclose the contents of the third letter sent to him by the president of Argentina, Javier Milei. While Lula and her party maintain a friendly relationship with Putin, the same does not occur with Milei.
The federal government clarified that the fundamental right to confidentiality of correspondence can be invoked to protect the private life and intimacy of the President of the Republic. However, it did not specify the duration of the secrecy, after which the letter could be made public. Officials who analyzed similar requests believe that letters interpreted as personally biased can remain confidential for up to 100 years, unless there is express consent for disclosure by the sender or recipient.
Letters exchanged by the president are handled by the Personal Office of the President of the Republic. Although this body is responsible for analyzing each case individually, the Civil House also participated in the response based on information from the personal office. There was an appeal to reconsider the decision.
The Civil House applied a restrictive precedent based on a request analyzed last year by the National Secretariat for Access to Information of the Comptroller General of the Union (CGU). Although the Lula government claims that the cases are “identical”, there are differences between the situations.
The request denied on April 16 sought access to “the full 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 specific communication was written by one head of state to another and sent by the PT member during his term as president, motivated by the results of the elections in Russia. Such correspondence generally follows the bureaucratic procedures of governments, via diplomacy and presidential palaces.
On the other hand, a previous request, made on January 18, 2023, sought to consult “copies of letters received by President Lula’s office from ordinary Brazilians and authorities between January 1 and January 18, 2022”. The CGU clarified that the requester confused the years and, in fact, was looking for letters received by Lula shortly after taking office, in the first eighteen days of last year. This request covered letters in general, regardless of the sender, whether by physical correspondence (post office) or electronic correspondence (messages and emails)
In the negative response, the Civil House cited CGU opinion No. 00025/2023, which analyzed the request for letters sent to Lula in January 2023. The CGU, however, applied a broader prohibition to the case, covering the entire period exercise of office and generally imposes secrecy, 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 office, they do not cease to deserve the protection of the rights to intimacy and privacy, guaranteed through from the fundamental guarantee to the inviolability of correspondence and communications”, says an excerpt from the controller’s opinion, 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. 5th, item XII of the Federal Constitution”. Planalto also considered that “any disclosure of its content would violate the guarantees of protection of the senders’ personal data”.
