Courts of Justice cannot suspend the contracts of interns.

I received messages from hundreds of interns asking for help (or perhaps it would be better to say: rescue) to avoid starving to death. The reason: the remuneration of thousands of interns has been suspended by some Courts of Justice.

I felt obligated to amplify the numerous messages, audio recordings, and desperate cries for help, especially since all law students who become lawyers were once interns. It's a kind of prerequisite. Or it should be. I then began to reflect on why so many good people remained silent when faced with the suspension of internship contracts at some state courts. 

I soon understood the reason: for most, an internship was just a prerequisite, a boring thing, so to speak. In short: unnecessary. In contrast to these people, I write here sharing the pain of all those who, like me, were only able to study because they had an internship, something that most in the judiciary never had to worry about.

Sad, very sad. Just as one cannot give what one has never had, one cannot feel the pain of hunger if abundance has never allowed one to feel it. To paraphrase Carolina de Jesus: those who eat invented hunger. Hence the difficulty most of these gentlemen and ladies have in seeing the world as it truly is – the Brazil that Carolina de Jesus speaks of, where the dizziness of hunger is worse than that of alcohol, because the dizziness of alcohol prevents one from singing while that of hunger makes one tremble. 

Suspending internship and trainee contracts amid one of the greatest humanitarian crises in world history can only make sense to those who long to see people trembling with hunger.

Left to their own devices by the justice system, there will be those who, if they don't die of hunger or Covid-19, will manage to return to work. Malnourished, I can only imagine the dialogue between a judge and an intern: 

Just looking at you, intern, is enough to see that there is hunger in the world. 

Yes, Your Excellency: just look at how I left here during the pandemic to know who caused it.

We need to be firm. Firm because, if this decision is upheld, the Justice system will be responsible for one of the greatest injustices against those who, as we well know, carry a large part of the Judiciary on their shoulders.

By the way, Caetano Veloso says that people are meant to shine, not to die of hunger. Well, I say: interns are meant to shine, but how is it possible to shine when the justice system wants them to starve? How can they shine if thousands of interns now won't have money to pay for college? How can they shine if, with online classes, thousands of interns won't have money to pay for internet, thus being unable to attend online classes?

How can they shine if the justice system, by suspending internship contracts, only offers them air to fill their stomachs, as Caroline de Jesus would say?

In a word: impossible! Saramago, incidentally, said that pornography wasn't obscene, but hunger was. Well, I say: more obscene than pornography and hunger is the hunger generated by justice. Virginia Woolf, in turn, stated that "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, when one has not dined well." Well, I say: one cannot judge or sentence anyone when one is responsible for someone else's hunger.

Someone might say that one cannot hold someone responsible for their hunger by suspending contracts if there is no legal backing to protect interns. Well, well, well. I repeat, if a law is needed for something so obvious, then we have failed as humanity. Something like the law that gives preference to the elderly to sit on banks – a necessity that only makes sense in a place where shame has never existed.

Ultimately, if someone only gets up to let an elderly person sit down because of a law, then the dignity of the person who gets up never accompanies them, as it remains seated and asleep. Furthermore, it's ironic to ask if the problem of the most expensive judiciary in the world, with expenses (in 2014) in the order of 68,4 billion, as demonstrated by the excellent article by the eminent Judge Reis Friede, is the fault of the interns... Is it really?

And finally, those who call it "whining" do so because, not knowing the world as it really is, they judge others by looking at their own navel, as if their lives, amidst abundance, were the reality of all Brazilians. And this, unfortunately, is the discourse of many judges who defend meritocracy without any shame in a country like Brazil.

The result, obviously, is decisions like the one that removed custody from a mother, using as "legal grounds" the fact that she lived in a favela and, not content with that, also claiming that the fact that the child was male required a paternal role model.

My goal with this text, which I sign as a former law intern, is to amplify the desperate cries for help and also (or, above all) to reaffirm that no one can judge or sentence anyone when they are responsible for someone's hunger. #Judiciary-the-interns-need-to-eat