LANÇAMENTO BRAZIL JUSTICE YEARBOOK 2024

The Brazil Justice Yearbook 2024 reaches its 12^th edition

“Reality Check — When things go wrong, it’s time to call the Judiciary.” This headline encapsulates the essence of the Brazil Justice Yearbook 2024, which reports on the key events involving the Brazilian Judiciary in 2024. The publication highlights how the Judiciary became the main trench of resistance against the attacks on democracy in 2023 and how it was drawn into a fierce dispute among the three branches of government.

In its 12^th edition, the Brazil Justice Yearbook provides an overview of the higher courts’ activities throughout 2023, presenting the most significant theses on the Brazilian Judiciary’s agenda and statistical data on the Judiciary. It also details the structure and functioning of the Justice System, who the judges are, and how they make their decisions.

Among the issues analyzed in the publication is the conflicting jurisprudential relationship between the Supreme Court, which has the final say on constitutional matters, and the Superior Court of Justice and the Superior Labor Court, which unify specific jurisprudence on infraconstitutional and labor issues.

The Yearbook also reveals that, among the branches of law, Labor Law is the most demanding on the Judiciary. Of the 60 million requests received by the Judiciary in 2023, 17 million were labor-related, accounting for 29% of the total. Consumer Law ranks third and shows the highest growth among the different branches of law, rising from 4.2 million cases in 2020 to 7.3 million in 2023, a 72% increase.

In the criminal sphere, a special report shows that gender-based crimes have surged over the past four years and in 2023 topped the list of criminal law cases, surpassing drug trafficking in terms of the number of requests in the Judiciary.

As of December 2023, the backlog of cases in the entire Brazilian Justice System stood at 82.4 million. That year, 35 million new cases were filed, while the 18,000 judges, appellate judges, and justices working in the system ruled on 32 million cases. Of this total, 26 million (over 80%) were resolved in the first-instance courts and tribunals.