Deep Dive
Years of accessibility auditing through prevention, not punishment
Prosecutor Henrique Pandim traces the Court's accessibility work back to former prosecutor-general José Gustavo, spanning years of upstream intervention. The strategy pivoted early: instead of suing mayors after failed projects, the Court reviews public works tenders before bidding closes, ensuring designs meet accessibility codes from the start. Pandim credits this approach with near-total adoption rates because most failures stem from ignorance or technical gaps, not malice. The Court also runs webinars for municipal engineers and maintains a dedicated permanent accessibility commission with four full-time staff — Mariana, Pedro, Catarina, and Valnícia — who rotate between oversight and training. This dual role lets the Court scale its small team by teaching technical staff in each municipality to self-audit, multiplying compliance across Goiás.
Public transit as the litmus test for disabled citizens' rights
The Court expanded its focus to collective transport in late 2025 after mounting media reports of access failures in Goiânia and surrounding metros. Pandim frames the issue sharply: public transit is the mechanism through which disabled citizens access constitutional entitlements — health care, education, leisure. Without it, they're blocked from fundamental rights. Wheelchair users, blind people, deaf people, people with dwarfism, and those with cerebral palsy each face distinct barriers, yet operators often treat access as a single checkbox. Complaints had piled up, sparking municipal council hearings and state disability council debates. The urgency crystallized when Pandim realized standard compliance audits wouldn't work; the Court needed ground truth from actual riders, not administrators' self-reports about elevator maintenance or driver training.
Survey design that captures structure and behavior together
Rather than mail a generic questionnaire to transit authorities, the Court is collecting direct testimony from disabled riders and their caregivers starting September 14 through October 31, targeting all 21 municipalities in the metropolitan region. The survey adapts its questions based on the user's disability type — if you mark 'wheelchair user,' the form reveals questions about ramp functionality, seating, driver assistance; if 'blind,' it probes for audio signals, tactile guidance, staff knowledge. Scope spans both hardware (terminal design, bus interiors, stop accessibility) and human behavior (driver courtesy, public passenger attitudes, staff preparedness). Pandim stresses that policy effectiveness requires both the physical infrastructure and trained personnel; one without the other fails disabled riders. The Court is distributing the survey through ten partner organizations — Associação dos Deficientes Físicos (ADEGO), Associação das Pessoas com Deficiência Visual, and others — who have built trust with disabled communities and can amplify reach far beyond a press release.
From diagnosis to targeted intervention, data-driven enforcement
Pandim signals the Court's next phase: once response rates are high enough to yield representative data, the Public Accounts Ministry will audit that diagnosis and decide whether to instruct individual prefectures to fix problems, initiate formal procedures, or file complaints with the Court itself. The quality of enforcement depends entirely on survey depth and breadth. A thin sample means guesswork; a robust one lets the Court pinpoint which municipalities are failing which disability groups and demand specific remedies. He emphasizes this requires active citizenship: disabled riders and their families must carve out five to eight minutes to answer, because aggregate data from hundreds of people will carry far more weight with mayors than anecdotes. Pandim closes by crediting his core team for years of unglamorous work and signals the Court's commitment to act decisively once the survey is closed.