> "Lula trial in Brazil violated due process, says UN rights panel" [0][1]
You have got to be joking. The UN has neither jurisdiction nor the access to the necessary information to make such a statement. This panel's opinion is worth nothing, and obtained purely as result of Brazil having a right wing president at the time, i.e., thy must take the opposite side, whatever it is, because right-wing-bad.
> The leaks make it fairly clear that the whole process was politically motivated to eliminate Lula from the race against Bolsonaro [7].
No, they don't, and no amount of linking to The Intercept will change that. They are partisan hacks trying (not very hard) to pass as independent journalists. Zero credibility whatsoever. Their leaks are a big nothingburger used as an excuse by a corrupt supreme court in order to be able to have a popular candidate that represented the establishment's interests in the election.
> It is not. The current President, chief of the executive and the Armed Forces, is the one who's being supposedly hit by these decisions.
The censorship and dictatorial actions are coming from the judiciary, against whose documented abuses of power the executive (and pretty no one) can do anything about.
The Brazilian supreme court has been playing the role of victim, judge and executor in illegal inquiries through Bolsonaro's term, with almost zero reaction from the media and the left, because the abuses are against "the right" and so they think it's a good thing. Ironically the only voices from the left denouncing the supreme court's abuses come from the Trotskyist party PCO.
> You can absolutely not call him a "criminal". That he is not, or at least it has not been proved within a fair trial that he is.
Again, he has been judged in three independent instances of the judiciary and found guilty in all of them. The sentence given by the judge you call "politically motivated" was considered low and increased by a superior instance. His people in the corruption scheme have given back millions they stole. His finance minister. People he has put in the board of state-run companies. If there was no corruption, why have they returned this money?
High profile sources? Come on, at least pretend to be arguing in good faith. Apart from "The Intercept" your other link is to "Progressive International" (Seriously? One of the members of this group is CUT, a violent labor union with deep ties to the Worker Party), which is republishing an article from "Brasil Wire", an entity tied multiple other far-left groups, who publish blatant bizarre partisan fake news on their home page.
> it's hard to not think it was electoral in nature.
It's hard to think anything at all without having seen the documentary.
Again, please stop defending censorship. It will come to bit you sooner or later.