Brazil justice orders impeachment process for VP, heightens crisis

Source: Reuters

A Supreme Court judge ordered Brazil's Congress on Tuesday to start impeachment proceedings against Vice President Michel Temer, deepening a political crisis and uncertainty over leadership of Latin America's largest country.

Justice Marco Aurelio Mello told the lower house to convene an impeachment committee to consider putting Temer on trial on charges he helped manipulate budget accounting as part of President Dilma Rousseff's administration.

Another committee is already analyzing similar charges against Rousseff, a leftist who is scrambling for support to defeat an impeachment vote in the lower house as early as mid-April.

Mello, who has a record of controversial decisions that later have been overturned by the full court, criticized the shelving of a request to impeach the vice president by lower house Speaker Eduardo Cunha, who in December launched impeachment proceedings against Rousseff on the same grounds.

Cunha said he will appeal against Mello's unprecedented ruling, which raises questions about the future governance of a country mired in political turmoil, a severe economic recession and an institutional crisis that is increasingly being handled by the judiciary.



Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-politics-rousseff-idUSKCN0X21MN