For the Brazilian government, legalization does not solve illegal gambling
Three ministers from the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva presented their case this Tuesday before the Supremo Tribunal Federal in defense of the betting ban, with the Attorney General of the Union delivering the core argument: legalization is not the answer to tackling illegal activity. Participants included Jorge Messias on behalf of the Abogacía General, Wellington César Lima e Silva for Justice and Public Security, and Alexandre Padilha for Health.
Messias's argument aims to dismantle the claim the industry has repeated since September. He contended that alternatives, oversight capacity, and damages must be weighed; otherwise, any prohibited market could demand authorization simply for having managed to flout the ban.
That remark was the government side's most significant point of the day, as it shifts the weight of a data point requested by the court itself. Fux announced during the same hearing that he wants to gather data on the growth of illegal platforms following the provisional measure, and the sector already has that figure on the table: entities monitoring the black market have counted more than 60,000 suspicious addresses since late September. Messias gets ahead of that evidence, challenging not its accuracy, but what conclusions can be drawn from it.
The reasoning has a structure worth making explicit. If the existence of an illegal market were enough to justify licensing an activity, the incentive would be placed on the wrong side: the greater the non-compliance, the stronger the claim for a license. What the government proposes is measuring the harm and the real capacity for enforcement before drawing that conclusion.
Lima e Silva addressed the other front, which is procedural. He denied that the government sought a shortcut by issuing the provisional measure and presented himself as a witness to the process: he stated that throughout 2026, hypotheses were debated on how to regulate satisfactorily to overcome the social crisis involved.
That point directly answers the claim raised by the Asociación Nacional de Juegos y Loterías in its lawsuit. ANJL questions whether the constitutional requirements of urgency were met to issue a provisional measure, and the minister's response is that the year was spent debating regulatory alternatives before arriving at the ban, meaning there was no haste, but rather an exhaustion of middle-ground options.
Padilha's presence completes the picture that the government itself had sought to assemble. The Abogacía General de la Unión requested an expansion of the hearing's attendee list to balance perspectives, and the additions included the Ministries of Health and of Justice and Public Security. Both gave presentations, alongside the AGU itself, and all three defended the provisional measure.
The Ministry of Health's participation in a hearing on a betting market is not a matter of mere protocol. It is a sign that the government is building its defense on a public health framework rather than a fiscal or economic one, which is consistent with the framing that Fux himself used when describing gambling addiction as both a public health and economic issue.
Here lies the tension that the court will have to resolve. The reporting justice shares the government's public health diagnosis and stated it clearly in the opening remarks, but in the same speech, he defended protecting the legitimate expectations of those who operated under previous regulations and mentioned the possibility of modulating the effects of a ruling. Agreeing on the problem does not mean agreeing on the instrument or its timeline.
The hearing is taking place within the framework of lawsuits challenging Medida Provisoria 1.394/2026, issued by Lula on September 25, which outlawed the advertising, intermediation, offering, and operation of fixed-odds betting in the country, with online gaming and sports betting within its scope. The session was convened by Fux and brings together 34 institutions, with ten minutes allocated to each.
The Abogacía General de la Unión is the body that legally represents the Brazilian state before the courts and defends the constitutionality of executive actions. A provisional measure carries the force of law upon publication, but Congress must convert it into law within constitutional deadlines for it to remain in effect, and it can be reviewed in parallel by the Supremo Tribunal Federal, which is the path open in this case. The hearing does not entail a court ruling, nor does it suspend the regulation.
Tags: Brasil, STF, Jorge Messias, MP 1.394/2026