I am Lula’s lawyer – this is what I can tell you about the man who always deserved to be president

I know him as a kind and principled man, determined to fight to improve the lives of the Brazilian people

The historic news of Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro has been widely hailed. But what the reports of his political resurrection cannot tell is of the extraordinary courage with which he has faced – and overcome – the malevolence of his legal enemies and the cruelty of the injustices they perpetrated. I witnessed this over six years as his international lawyer, fighting – successfully – for his exoneration in the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee.

Lula’s backstory is inspiring enough. At eight years of age, he was selling peanuts on the street to provide for his impoverished family. At 14 he passed his only exam – to become a lathe worker. In time, he rose to leadership of his trade union fighting against the military regime for living wages and democratic rights.

As president of Brazil for two terms, even his enemies concede that he pulled 20 million of his people out of poverty with social programmes that were adopted by other countries and UN agencies. He did not, like so many other popular leaders (he had 80 per cent approval ratings) at the end of his term, attempt to change the constitution to give himself a third term in office.

I know him as a kind and principled man, determined to fight to improve the lives of the people, only to become the target of a hostile, politically motivated magistrate investigating corruption.

There was a lot of it – across all the political parties – but not a penny could be traced to Lula personally. Nonetheless, under Brazil’s arcane, inquisitorial system, which allows such officials to head investigations and then become the trial judges of their own suspects, he was convicted in a case that could never have been brought in Britain.

It concerned an apartment owned by a building society on which his wife had, years before, made a downpayment. The society collapsed and was taken over by a corrupt contractor, which offered Lula and his wife a better deal – a triplex – which they never accepted. There was no transfer and no quid pro quo that is necessary to prove corruption, yet Lula was given a 12-year prison sentence. That magistrate (rewarded by becoming Bolsonaro’s first Minister of Justice) has now been exposed by the Supreme Court as irredeemably biased.

I was the only observer of the farcical appeal hearing, at a court whose president had already declared the magistrate’s judgment “impeccable” and where the prosecutor sat beside the judges. After defence counsel addressed, the judges pulled out their pre-written judgments to reject his appeal and the magistrate ordered him to jail.

At this point, some urged him to flee the country or to stand alongside his millions of supporters and to fight. Instead, he appealed for calm and announced: “I am not going on the run. I am not hiding. I want my enemies to know that I am going to prove my innocence”.

It took a long time – 585 days, mostly of solitary confinement, mostly in maximum security prisons – before he could do so. His beloved wife died, many thought from the stress and heartache as she was wrongly accused as a co-conspirator.

Internationally, the centre-left took fright at the C-word (corruption) and remained silent; but Sharan Burrow, head of the ILO, championed his cause – and in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn expressed his support.

In 2018, we brought a case against Brazil in the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva, which directed that he should be allowed to stand, and to campaign from prison, in that year’s presidential elections. He was well ahead of Bolsonaro in the polls. But the government disqualified him and the neo-fascists then defeated his replacement.

Last year, the Supreme Court finally annulled his conviction – in part, because of the proven bias of the magistrate. The judgment of the UN Human Rights Committee confirms this: it ruled that his trial was demonstrably unfair, the tapping of his telephones (and those of his lawyers) an illegal invasion of his privacy, and that his pre-trial demonisation by the magistrate and his police agents had turned his prosecution into a persecution.

Lula’s inauguration takes place on 1 January. Bolsonaro has not, at the time of writing, conceded defeat. He relied, in the last week of the campaign , on an enthusiastic video endorsement from Donald Trump – and may try to challenge the result, even though Brazil’s vote counting procedures are state of the art.

But Lula has overcome all of the obstacles thrown his way by an establishment prepared to do everything in its power to stop him. He’s already made history by being elected president of a state that persecuted him, and says he will fight to ensure the will of the people is upheld.

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As he often quotes from a favourite Pablo Neruda poem, “You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring from coming.”

His victory is a gift for Cop27: he will end logging in the Amazon so the lungs of the world can breathe freely again. He will implement socialist policies to tackle poverty and inequality. He will stop discrimination against ethnic minorities, the easy sale of guns and Bolsonaro’s promise to his evangelical base to prosecute women for having abortions.

But most of all, his election signifies an extraordinary triumph against injustice.

Geoffrey Robertson KC is founding head of Doughty Street Chambers, who acted for Lula in the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee