Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva today filed a petition with the UN Human Rights Committee outlining alleged abuses of power in the corruption case he is embroiled in.
At a press conference in London, his Brazilian and British lawyers said they had just returned from the United Nations in Geneva where they had lodged the petition.
The dossier outlined alleged violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and alleged abuses of power by judge Sergio Moro.
Moro heads the investigation into a vast scam centred on state oil company Petrobras in which contractors paid bribes to receive inflated contracts, and stolen money was funnelled to politicians and political parties.
The probe is known as Operation Car Wash.
Lula faces a corruption case related to the Petrobras scandal and is being investigated for an allegedly much wider role in the scheme.
"Lula is bringing his case at the UN because he cannot get justice in Brazil under its inquisitorial system," said high-profile British human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.
"The same judge who is invading his privacy in this case can have him arrested at any moment and will then become his trial judge, deciding on his guilt or innocence without a jury.
"This is a serious fault in the inquisitorial system as it operates in Brazil."
The petition invites the committee to find that the Brazilian justice system should be changed so that a judge investigating a case should not also be the trial judge.
The petition alleges that Lula's right to privacy, freedom from arbitrary arrest and right to be presumed innocent until found guily has been violated.
Lawyers for the 70-year-old Workers' Party founder said the leftist icon's phone and those of his family and lawyers had been tapped, with transcripts and audio then leaked to Brazilian media -- some of which, they claimed, was illegally obtained outside the remit of a warrant.
Robertson claimed the probe amounted to a "gross violation of the most fundamental right to a fair trial".
"There's no evidence that he took backhanders or kickbacks in the period when he was president," he added.
Dozens of top executives and politicians at both the Workers' Party and its rivals have been charged or probed with involvement in the scheme, which flourished for much of Lula's 2003-2010 presidency.
