Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice (Superior Tribunal de Justiça/STJ) recently suspended all search and seizure procedures in the country. The order was issued by Minister Marco Buzzi, who submitted two special appeals from the state of Rio Grande do Sul (REsp 1951888 and REsp 1951662) to judgment under the rite of repetitive appeals – a judgment that aims to standardize and bind lower courts to the Superior Tribunal’s decisions in appeals whose matters are the same.
The purpose of the judgment is to define whether, in order to prove delay in contracts guaranteed by fiduciary alienation, it is sufficient or not to send an extrajudicial notification to the debtor's address in contract – thus dispensing signing of an acknowledgment of receipt by the recipient him or herself.
Decree-Law 911/69 paragraph 2, article 2 states that the delay can be proven by a registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt, thus not requiring the signature to be that of the recipient him or herself. This is also the STJ’s prevailing jurisprudence, having long considered the debtor's personal signature unnecessary.
According to the decision, suspension of these procedures was justifiable to ensure the principles of legal certainty, isonomy, economy and procedural celerity, allowing the Superior Court’s final thesis to be applied to the suspended facts in a uniform way, by the ordinary instances.
Under the repetitive appeals system, all search and seizure procedures that are the object of the decision are suspended until judgment of the submitted issue, not exceeding a one-year period.
However, certain search and seizure procedures were excluded from the suspension, depending on the type of delay.
