Leadership Quote by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

"Everyone is innocent unless proven otherwise" is a civics-class principle that turns into a political weapon the moment a country starts arguing about who gets to count as "everyone". Coming from Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, it lands with extra voltage because his public life has been defined by the collision between mass politics and the judiciary. Lula is not a neutral lecturer on due process; he is a figure whose legitimacy has repeatedly been adjudicated in courts and in the court of public opinion, especially during Brazil's corruption fever and the Lava Jato era, when legal procedure became a proxy battlefield for ideological war.

The intent is clean on the surface: affirm the presumption of innocence, a democratic brake on state power and media frenzy. The subtext is sharper: a rebuke to punishment-by-headline and to systems that treat accusation as verdict when the accused is politically convenient. It also quietly shifts the burden of moral proof away from the individual and back onto institutions. If innocence is the default, then prosecutors, judges, and journalists carry the obligation to be rigorous, not theatrical.

Rhetorically, the line works because it's disarmingly simple while forcing an uncomfortable question: if we only believe in presumption of innocence when it protects people we like, do we believe in it at all? Lula's version isn't just legalism; it's a bid to reclaim narrative authority in a country where the law has often been asked to do the work of politics.