50 personalities call for “civic outrage” to force politicians to reform the justice system

The signatories “urge the President of the Republic, the Assembly of the Republic and the Government, as well as all national political parties, to take the necessary initiatives to implement a reform in the Justice sector, which, fully respecting the independence of the courts, the autonomy of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the guarantees of judicial defense, is unequivocally directed towards resolving the bottlenecks and dysfunctions that have long undermined its effectiveness and public legitimacy”.

They sign the petition, among others, the former presidents of parliament Augusto Santos Silva, Ferro Rodrigues and Mota Amaral, the former leaders of the PSD and CDS, Rui Rio and Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos, the former ministers Leonor Beleza, David Justino, Fernando Negrão, António Vitorino, José Vieira da Silva, António Barreto, Correia de Campos, Alberto Costa, Pinto Ribeiro, Maria de Lurdes Rodrigues, the former president of the Constitutional Court João Caupers.

O admiral Melo Gomes and general Pinto Ramalho, the former governor of the Bank of Portugal Vitor Constâncio and judge-advisor Teresa Pizarro Beleza, signed the document, as did Isabel Soares, Manuel Sobrinho Simões, Álvaro Beleza and the social democrats Paulo Mota Pinto , André Coelho Lima and Pacheco Pereira.

Justice “on the margins of scrutiny or accountability”

In the text it is considered that “Justice operates almost entirely outside of any democratic scrutiny or accountability, despite being constitutionally administered in the name of the People” and that “the feeling of impunity that the ineffectiveness of the system, in itself, already transmits to society, is thus aggravated by the deficit in existing internal evaluation mechanisms and the lack of external scrutiny mechanisms uncompromised with the apparatus itself judiciary”.

“The prolonged passivity in the face of this iniquitous reality allowed us to reach the painful limit of seeing the action of the Public Prosecutor’s Office generate the fall of two parliamentary majorities resulting from recent elections, despite the fact that, in both cases, in their first intervention, the courts not having provided support and even having contradicted the accuser’s narrative”, they argue.

“To make the situation worse, the The country continued to witness the inconceivable, when, after a long five months passed between the Prime Minister resigning, following the PGR statement, and his termination of office, the Public Prosecutor’s Office did not even deign to inform him about the object investigation nor summoned him for any procedural action. In addition to constituting undue interference in political power, these episodes also do not comply with the requirements of the democratic rule of law“, they maintain.

Among the problems identified, subscribers refer to “recurrent breaches of judicial secrecy, with the active participation of a large part of the media” which “they give rise to popular trials, boycott investigations and grossly trample on the most basic rights of many citizens, cruelly penalizing them for the rest of their lives, even when they end up judicially acquitted“.

“A regime that accepts this way of proceeding loses a significant part of its moral authority before those from whom it wants to distinguish itself in terms of ethics and respect for Human Rights. Violation of the constitutional rules of criminal investigation is really a regime problem”, defend.

Addressing criminal investigation, the text points out “serious abuses in the use of measures that strongly restrict the rights, freedoms and guarantees of citizens, namely with the proliferation of prolonged telephone tapping, unjustified home searches and even hasty and dubious preventive arrests legality”.

“The montages of the now usual media spectacle, in the interventions of the Public Prosecutor’s Office against political agents, along with the surgical placement of news about ongoing investigations, have intentionally confused the tree with the forest, shaping public opinion towards the idea that all public office holders are equal and that everyone is corrupt until proven otherwise”, they indicate.

For the subscribers, “this perverse way of acting, with more political than judicial contours, has produced obvious wear and tear on the regime and, consequently, reinforces popular discontent and opens the doors to populism and demagoguery, even more so than many processes eternalize without conclusion or end without accusation or without judicial conviction”.

AND “A reform is necessary that, although not disregarding the legitimate aspirations of justice agents, is not designed to suit the corporate interests of the various system operators, but that has the citizen and the defense of the democratic rule of law as the central axis of its concerns“, they say.

“Institute and enforce requirements of consideration, rigor, proportionality and concrete justification, whether in the opening of the criminal investigation or in the use of particularly intrusive means of investigation such as wiretaps and home searches, as well as in their periodic review, making it prevail from the beginning, the constitutional principle of the presumption of innocence” is one of the priorities highlighted by the subscribers.