Implementing a guarantee Judge in Brazil:

a path towards an accusatory system and a real magistrate impartiality?

Abstract

Brazil’s criminal system emerges from a continental European tradition, largely inspired by the changes brought by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, which introduced a mixed form of criminal prosecution: with an eminently inquisitorial phase of investigation and an accusatory trial, based on broad defense and contradiction and the separation of the functions of prosecution and trial. This is the current formation of Brazil’s penal system, which, however, will soon be transformed by the Anticrime Package, Law no. 13.964/2019, which provides the existence of a guarantee judge competent since the investigation phase until the formal offer of the indictment by the member of the Public Prosecutor's Office. For this reason, and as a hypothesis of the investigation, this guarantee judge is supposed to guarantee the existence of an accusatory model in Brazil's justice system. Due to this panorama, the research will aim to draw a scenario of the distinction between the accusatory and inquisitive models and their reflection in the Brazilian criminal legal system, besides analyzing the figure of the guarantee judge as proposed in the Anticrime Package, its assumptions and competencies, as well as the jurisprudential and political discussion that follows its formal implementation.