Brazil’s attorney general renews push at Supreme Court to outlaw online betting and gaming

Brazil’s attorney general Paulo Gonet has once again urged the Supreme Federal Court (STF) to declare online betting and gaming houses illegal, arguing that the current “bets law” creates a serious violation of fundamental rights due to the “predatory” nature of the virtual gambling market.

Despite online betting and iGaming now operating under a federal framework in Brazil, Attorney General of the Republic Paulo Gonet has filed a fresh submission at the Supreme Federal Court calling for online sportsbooks and casino-style platforms to be outlawed again. In a new petition, Gonet tells the Court that the existing legislation has produced a “serious situation of violation of fundamental rights”, citing what he describes as the “predatory nature of the online betting market”.

The request has been attached to an ongoing constitutional case that challenges the so-called “Lei das Bets” — the law and Ministry of Finance decrees that regulate fixed-odds betting and online gambling. Justice Luiz Fux is the rapporteur in the case, but no hearing date has yet been set. Gonet uses the filing to reiterate arguments first raised in a 2024 direct action of unconstitutionality (ADI), in which he claimed that Laws 13.756/2018 and 14.790/2023 fail to meet “minimum requirements” for protecting constitutional values and consumer rights.

The latest intervention also intersects with a separate dispute over decrees that, at Fux’s request, bar beneficiaries of social programmes from registering on betting platforms. The Brazilian Association for Economic Freedom (Able) has told the Court that this blanket exclusion amounts to “excessive state paternalism” and “socioeconomic segregation” and has urged instead a ban on using welfare funds for betting rather than excluding recipients altogether.

In response, the Attorney General’s Office (AGU) has argued that such a targeted veto would be unworkable once benefits are paid out, because the state cannot track the origin of every deposit to betting sites. Gonet, for his part, maintains that the deeper problem lies in what he sees as weak structural safeguards in the current framework and has again floated a return to Brazil’s pre-regulation regime, under which this type of gambling activity was treated as illegal.

The STF has not yet indicated when it will rule on either the constitutionality of the bets law or the decrees affecting welfare recipients. Until then, Brazil’s regulated market remains in force but under mounting legal and political pressure from the country’s top prosecutor, who continues to frame online betting as incompatible with the level of consumer and social protection required by the Constitution.