The Italian court published this Thursday (16) a second sentence in favor of the extradition to Brazil of the former deputy Carla Zambelli (PL-SP).
In the new document, the Court of Appeal of Pomegranate deals exclusively with the case in which Zambelli chased a man with a gun in his hands in São Paulo, in 2022.
At the end of March, the court had already ruled in favor of extradition of Zambelli for the invasion of the CNJ (National Council of Justice) and the issuance of a false arrest warrant against the minister Alexandre de Moraesfrom STF (Federal Supreme Court).
The two cases were analyzed together in court hearings, but the judges decided to publish two separate sentences. According to Sheet found, as Zambelli is in prison, the court may have given priority to the decision on the first extradition request, leaving the second to be analyzed with less urgency.
Brazil’s extradition request regarding the firearm case reached Italy in August 2025, when Zambelli was already imprisoned in Rome and the request regarding the invasion of the CNJ system was already being processed at the Court of Appeal. Therefore, technically the two requests were in two different issues.
In the first case, Zambelli was sentenced to ten years in prison. In the second, another five years and three months.
The former deputy’s defense filed an appeal at the Court of Cassation, the last instance of Italian justice, against the first decision of the Court of Appeal. Now, you will have 15 days to appeal this second sentence. The expectation is that the Court of Cassation will decide by June – the date of the first hearing could be communicated in mid-May.
The case will then go to the Italian government, through the Ministry of Justice, which will have 45 days to give the final word.
In this Thursday’s sentence, to which the Sheet had access, the court again rejects the arguments presented by the defense. As in the first case, Zambelli’s lawyers in Italy asked for the extradition to be denied mainly on the grounds that the former deputy was a victim of political persecution, due to the STF’s alleged bias.
Furthermore, they maintain that Colmeia, a medium security prison in the Federal District, would not have sufficient conditions to receive the former deputy.
The trial of the criminal action on armed persecution was completed in August last year at the STF. The case rapporteur was the minister Gilmar Mendesand the final score for Zambelli’s conviction was 9 to 2.
The Italian judges reject the court’s bias thesis. “The STF is made up of 11 ministers (…) and has competence in criminal proceedings against members of the National Congress. The competence is constitutional in nature, not the result of a discretionary choice by the prosecution or the Executive Branch”, write the judges.
Still regarding the supposed bias of the STF, they say that the issue is “unfounded”. “There is a lack of a concrete objective element of harm”, he states, just as there is a lack of “concrete modalities with which the issue was dealt with within the scope of the Brazilian process”.
Regarding prison conditions, the court practically repeats what it had written in the first sentence: “the documentation produced by the defense (…) is largely composed of heterogeneous material and of insufficient evidentiary quality.”
The new point of this sentence is that the defense tried to classify the persecution carried out by Zambelli against Luan Araújo in the category of political crime. The treaty between the countries on the subject prohibits extradition in this case.
The judges reject the theory. “The conduct attributed to extradanda (Zambelli) in the Brazilian case – detention and possession of a firearm and private violence using a firearm in the Luan Araújo confrontation – do not form part of the notion of political crime, not even in its broadest sense”, they state.
For the court, Zambelli’s attitudes offended “individual safety, personal freedom and public security”, whose protections are “proper to any consolidated democratic system”. This does not have a political connotation, the judges continue, “simply because the author held a public position at the time of the events.”
The issue of Zambelli’s dual citizenship was again assessed by the court, but was also not considered an obstacle to extradition.
The analysis of extradition is based on a treaty on the subject signed by Italy and Brazil in the 1990s. It stipulates that only a convicted person can be extradited if they have had the minimum rights of defense guaranteed in their country of origin and in the absence of reasons to suppose that, after being extradited, they will be subjected to punishment or treatment that violates fundamental rights.
Second most voted federal deputy in the state of São Paulo in 2022, with 946 thousand votes, Zambelli was one of the main names in Bolsonarism. After being spared from impeachment by the Chamber plenary, a decision that was later overturned by the STF, Zambelli resigned from office in December.
