former “police of police” is in charge of the Internal Administration

Maria Margarida Blasco Martins Augusto, the 67-year-old independent who will succeed the socialist José Luís Carneiro as Minister of Internal Administration, was in charge of the General Inspection of Internal Administration (IGAI) in the period between 2012 and 2019. Before that, between From 2004 to 2008, this career judge had been director general of the Security Intelligence Service (SIS).

The period in which she was Inspector General of Internal Administration was marked by several cases in which the problem of racism in the police was raised, due to the excessive use of force. There were cases in which PSP agents were accused of police violence in Bairro da Jamaica, at the Alfragide police station and in Cova da Moura, among other cases.

In an interview with PÚBLICO and Rádio Renascença, when asked about those and other cases of abuse of authority against citizens of different ethnicities, Margarida Blasco replied that “whoever carries out these types of acts and is condemned must, of course, be eradicated”. “We want security forces and services that uncompromisingly comply with human rights. And in this we are intransigent. We can understand certain phenomena, but we do not agree with them. And we want to go deeper,” she stated in 2018.

In 2019, two years before finishing her third term at IGAI, Margarida Blasco left her position to take the position of judge advisor to the Supreme Court of Justice. Two years later, in 2021, she was happy.

Now, Margarida Blasco assumes a position for which she had already been approached in 2014, when Miguel Macedo resigned from the Government of Pedro Passos Coelho, due to suspicions of corruption (not confirmed in the trial).

One of his first ventures will be the negotiation of remuneration issues with the GNR military and PSP agents who marked the Legislative pre-campaign with protests in which they demanded a compensation allowance equivalent to that which the Ministry of Justice had awarded to Judiciary Police inspectors. .