Brazil Supreme Court suspends review of land-based casino gambling ban

Brazil’s Supreme Court has paused a hearing that could decide whether land-based casino gambling and bingo can still be treated as criminal offences under current law. For PSPs, the key point is that Brazil’s online betting framework is already in place, while the land-based question now sits in a separate constitutional review with a potentially wider legal ripple effect.

1. Supreme Court president Edson Fachin agreed to temporarily suspend the hearing after Minister Flávio Dino asked for more time to review the case. The matter is Extraordinary Appeal (RE) 966.177, which asks whether the prohibition under the Law of Criminal Offences of 1941 still fits with the Federal Constitution of 1988, or whether it has lost validity.
2. The court is not being asked to legalise casinos, bingo halls, or other gambling formats. Its job is narrower: to decide whether the current prohibition can continue to be enforced as a criminal offence under existing legislation. Oral arguments began on Wednesday, August 5, and rapporteur Luiz Fux started reading his opinion before the session was closed and scheduled to resume on Thursday.
3. Dino said the case overlaps with the legislation on fixed-odds betting and needs clarification. His point was blunt enough: if gambling is a misdemeanour, is betting also a misdemeanour? That matters because Brazil already regulates online casino gambling, introduced alongside licensed sports betting in January 2025, so the court is dealing with a legal boundary that is not just theoretical.
4. The action was filed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Rio Grande do Sul against a decision by the Appeals Panel of the Special Criminal Courts, which had rejected gambling as a criminal offence on the grounds that the rule conflicts with constitutional principles. If a majority of ministers agrees, land-based gambling would no longer be treated as a criminal offence.
5. Even then, operation would not become automatic. Any authorisation for gambling would still require regulations approved by the National Congress and sanctioned by the federal government. For now, the political backdrop remains mixed: the current government, led by President Lula da Silva, has said it will push to ban online casino gambling in Brazil.