RIO DE JANEIRO (CN) - Brazil's Supreme Court on Friday unanimously repealed a law in the southern state of Santa Catarina that banned race-based affirmative action policies at state public universities and at higher education institutions receiving state funds.

Justice Gilmar Mendes, writing for the nation's highest court, said it already has settled precedent on race-based affirmative action and found the Santa Catarina law unconstitutionally infringed on university autonomy and ignored racial inequalities that persist in the state.

Mendes also concluded that the Santa Catarina law reflected an unconstitutional failure to assess the relevant facts and legislative assumptions by extinguishing a public policy without any concrete evaluation of its effects and results.

Signed into law in January, the legislation barred race-based affirmative action in student admissions and in the hiring of professors, staff and other workers, while preserving policies based on economic criteria, disability and attendance at state public high schools.

The law also provided for the annulment of admissions processes, a fine of 100,000 reais (about $20,000) per public notice and cuts to public funding in case of non-compliance.

A day after it was signed, the Santa Catarina Court of Justice preliminarily suspended its effects, preventing immediate disruption to ongoing admissions processes.

At the same time, the Socialism and Liberty Party, the National Union of Students and Educafro - a nonprofit that advocates for Black students and other underrepresented groups - asked the Supreme Court to immediately suspend the law and strike it down in full as formally and materially unconstitutional.

Rodrigo Sartoti, attorney for Socialism and Liberty Party, said the ruling has binding nationwide effect, requiring state courts and public authorities to follow it. He said other state legislatures could still try to pass similar laws, but any such attempt would likely be struck down again.

Sartoti said the ruling echoed arguments that the law violated the Inter-American Convention Against Racism, which Brazil has incorporated into its constitutional order and which requires the state to adopt affirmative action policies.

Additional challenges were also filed by the Brazilian Bar Association, the Workers' Party, the Communist Party of Brazil and the National Confederation of Industrial Workers.

The law also faced challenges on other fronts. The Santa Catarina Public Prosecutor's Office filed a direct constitutional challenge in state court and the Federal Prosecutor's Office for Citizens' Rights issued a technical opinion saying the statute amounted to social rollback and violated international conventions.

Irapua Santana, a partner at Rio de Janeiro-based BFBM Advogados and a volunteer lawyer for Educafro, said the victory was "extremely important" because it reaffirmed affirmative action as a constitutionally protected state policy.

"This attack did not break new ground. It just pretended to forget that," he said.

In his view, the ruling reaffirms an already settled understanding and helps move the debate to another level, at a time when the court has more explicitly recognized the constitutional duty to confront structural racism. "I hope now we can focus on other fronts, such as reparations," he said.

Settled case law

The ruling returned to an issue the Supreme Court had already decided in 2012, when it upheld race-based affirmative action in university admissions. Since then, that precedent has supported the expansion of affirmative action policies in areas including higher education and public service.

Brazil's higher education affirmative action system is one of the country's main equity policies of the past few decades. Structured nationwide under a 2012 law and updated in 2023, it built on and expanded policies that several universities had already begun adopting in the 2000s.

Although public debate often centers on race, the Brazilian model combines income, public-school background and race, with the distribution of slots calibrated to the demographic makeup of each state.

The system reshaped the social and racial makeup of Brazil's public universities. Rio de Janeiro State University was the first to adopt affirmative action in admissions in 2003 and other universities soon followed.

Data from the 2024 Higher Education Census show that more than 1.4 million students entered through those policies between 2013 and 2024, with 133,078 new students in 2024 alone.

The Santa Catarina government argued that the state could adopt its own inclusion model focused on socioeconomic criteria.

In a filing sent to the Supreme Court in January, the state administration said Santa Catarina has a majority-white population and pointed to the Tuition-Free University program as evidence of its commitment to democratizing access to higher education.

The state attorney general's office said the law did not abolish affirmative action in general, but merely replaced racial criteria with what it described as objective, universal and controllable criteria.

Race in Brazil

According to the Santa Catarina government, 81.5% of the state's population identifies as white, while Black and brown residents account for 18.1%. The filing argued that percentage was significantly lower than the national average.

Those figures, however, conflict with the 2022 census produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. According to that survey, 76.3% of Santa Catarina residents identified as white and 23.3% identified as Black or brown.

A study by the Center for Studies and Data on Racial Inequalities, produced amid the controversy, found that the Black population in the state remains at a disadvantage in income, work and education indicators.

According to the report, the unemployment rate for Black people remained nearly double that of white people between 2012 and 2023, Black representation in management positions remained far below its share of the population and, in 2023, Black people's average income amounted to 65.5% of white people's average income.

Marcelo Henrique Romano Tragtenberg, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and one of the study's coordinators, said those figures show an accumulation of disadvantages for Black students from basic education through university. He added that removing the racial criterion would make access to higher education even harder, with later effects on the labor market.

"People with higher education earn more," Tragtenberg said. "But today, even with higher education, Black people earn less. So, this law confines the Black population to secondary education, which will widen income inequality between Black and white people in Santa Catarina."

He also said policies limited to graduates of public schools do not necessarily change the proportion of Black students at universities and that proposals similar to Santa Catarina's have already surfaced in at least a dozen states.

"There is a coordinated effort by the Brazilian far right to revoke these policies," Tragtenberg said. "What is curious is that the far right is not against income-based or public-school affirmative action, but it is against race-based affirmative action because it does not recognize that racism exists in Brazil."

Courthouse News reporter Marilia Marasciulo is based in Brazil.

Source: Courthouse News Service