Betting Bodies Ask Brazil's Supreme Court to Suspend Lula's Gambling Ban

^{Brazil's Supremo Tribunal Federal in Brasília, where three pending constitutional challenges to the country's betting law are now tied to the new ban. (Photo: Alex Pereira / Wikimedia Commons)}

Two Brazilian betting industry associations filed a petition with the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) on 28 September 2026, asking the court to suspend a presidential decree that shut down the country's licensed online betting and casino market three days earlier.

The Associação Nacional de Jogos e Loterias (ANJL) and the Instituto Brasileiro de Jogo Responsável (IBJR), both recognised as amici curiae in three existing constitutional challenges to Brazil's 2023 betting law, submitted the filing to Justice Luiz Fux, who is the rapporteur on those cases.

What the Decree Does

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Provisional Measure 1,394/2026 on 25 September 2026, which the filing says 'prohibits, immediately, the offer of online games and sports betting by fixed-odds betting platforms.' The measure extinguishes existing operator authorisations after a 30-day grace period, bars new licences, and requires operators to take down their sites and apps within 10 days or face blocking.

Operators must also prove liquidity and hand over individualised bettor records within two days of shutting down, under a daily fine of R$200,000 for non-compliance. Financial institutions have seven days to return remaining player balances, with unclaimed funds routed to a state-owned bank account.

The associations argue the measure was issued without demonstrating the constitutional urgency a provisional measure requires. Their filing states there is no proof that 'anything happened or worsened seriously' in the regulated betting sector to justify shutting down 'overnight' an activity that had been 'widely regulated for less than three years and remains extensively supervised.'

What ANJL and IBJR Are Asking For

The filing asks the court, as a first option, to suspend the entire provisional measure until Congress votes on whether to convert it into law, reject it, or let it lapse, and to declare that the 2018 and 2023 laws underpinning Brazil's regulated betting market remain fully in force in the meantime.

If the court will not grant that, the associations ask it to at least suspend the measure's effect on operators that already hold valid federal authorisations, or, failing that, to extend the shutdown deadlines to no less than six months so operators can wind down in an orderly way while bettors can still withdraw their balances.

'It is not a provisional measure that adjusts, restricts or conditions a regulated activity; it is an act of the Executive that extinguishes, in full and within days, a market that the National Congress created by law, at the Executive's own request.'

ANJL also told the court it is separately filing its own direct constitutional challenge to the decree, alongside a request that the STF rule on the constitutionality of the underlying betting law. The two associations argue the three existing cases before the court, brought by a commerce confederation, a political party and the Procurador-Geral da República, should be decided against striking down the law given the new decree's impact.

The petition follows Brazil's own 6 October deadline for betting platforms to go fully offline, part of the wind-down timetable set out in the same decree. It builds on Lula's initial announcement of the ban on 25 September, which came weeks ahead of Brazil's October elections.