Alexandre de Moraes

Alexandre de Moraes (Brazilian Portuguese: [aleˈʃɐ̃dɾi dʒi moˈɾajs]; born 13 December 1968) is a Brazilian jurist, former politician, former president of the Superior Electoral Court, and current justice of the Supreme Federal Court. Moraes was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Michel Temer in 2017 when serving as Minister of Justice and Public Security. Previously, Moraes had acted as Secretary for Public Security in the state of São Paulo and had been a member of the Brazilian Public Prosecutor's Office. From around 2020, Moraes has generated wide public attention in Brazil and abroad for ordering several arrests, search warrants, and terminations of social media accounts of individuals and groups involved or suspected to be involved in planning coups and propagating fake news, in addition to brief nationwide blocks of widely used platforms that had failed to comply with Brazilian court orders, such as Telegram and Twitter, until their regularization under Brazilian law. He has been a widely controversial figure since, gathering a great number of both supporters and opponents. While critics say his measures are authoritarian, abusive, unconstitutional, and partisan, to supporters they are legal, albeit stern, and have been necessary to maintain Brazil's democratic rule, preventing coups and the rise of extremism. Among Moraes's supporters is the current president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and among his critics is the former president Jair Bolsonaro, American president Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. Moraes's tenure as president of Brazil's Superior Electoral Court and certain actions he took during the 2022 Brazilian general election have made him the target of criticism, including conspiracy theories, by Bolsonaro and his supporters. After the 2023 Brazilian Congress attack, Moraes ordered several controversial judicial actions, being criticized for combining investigative and judicial functions against the coup planners, authorizing preventive detentions, content removal and...