Antonio Pedro Santos / LUSA
Prime Minister Luís Montenegro and the Minister of Internal Administration, Margarida Blasco
An open letter to the Prime Minister is signed by 21 personalities, who accuse Luís Montenegro’s executive of “attacking the social and legal rule”. “Proximity policing is not done with batons.”
Twenty-one personalities from the fields of politics and justice accuse the Government, in an open letter to the Prime Minister, of “attack on the social and legal state” with that of last week, which they consider intolerable.
Subscribers to the letter published this Sunday by the newspaper consider it urgent to alert Luís Montenegro to the “circumstance intolerable that, 50 years after April”, which brought the social state and the rule of law, the Government “has given unequivocal signs this week of not understanding the deep meaning of ‘social state’ or ‘rule of law’, reaching the heart and the social project of the Portuguese people written in the Constitution since the conquest of democracy is in our bones”.
The 21 “figures” who sign the letter
A is signed by 21 personalitiesthe majority of the left-wing political area, such as the former president of the Assembly of the Republic Augusto Santos Silvathe former Minister of Internal Administration of the PS Government Constança Urbano de Souzathe former Secretary of State of the same authority Isabel Onetoand the parliamentary leaders of the PS, Alexandra Leitão e Fabian Figueiredodo BE.
The former president of the Constitutional Court Joaquim Sousa Ribeirothe judge Maria João Antunes and the constitutionalist Jorge Reis Novais subscribe to the open letter, as does the scientific coordinator of the Emigration Observatory Rui Pena Piresthe former Minister of Education Maria de Lurdes Rodrigueslawyer and university professor João Mirandaand the musician and activist Dino d’Santiago.
PAN leaders, Inês de Souza Realfrom Livre, Rui Tavaresthe parliamentary leader of Livre, Isabel Mendes Lopesand MEPs Ana Catarina Mendes (PS) e Catarina Martins (BE) sign the letter, as well as former deputies Antonio Topa Gomesfrom the PSD, Manuel Loffdo PCP, e José Leitãofrom the PS, and the socialist deputy Claudia Santos.
“There is a symbolic moment in which this Government’s attack on the social and legal rule is exposed to the sun in all its rawness, this moment that an image inscribed in our collective memory, the portrait of people profiled by the State against the wall while in Parliament of Portugal debated and approved, with the votes of the Democratic Alliance and Chega, the first exception to the universality of the fundamental right to health”, they say.
The subscribers argue that “disproportionate police actions violate the law” and the Constitution, and consider that the image of people “profiled by dozens of police against the wall” based on the criteria of “their origin, the diversity of their culture or the color of their skin” remembers “times we thought were buried”.
Recalling the words of the President of the Republic, who defended as a general principle that security must be exercised with modesty, they denounce a “unacceptable exposure of people” and argue that “the way those people were treated unequivocally constitutes a degrading treatmentprohibited by the Constitution in paragraph 2 of its article 25 (“no one may be subjected to (…) degrading or inhuman treatment (…)”)”.
The signatories of the letter also say they respect “all agents of the security forces and services who guide their conduct by legality” and criticize that “they are used as lapel pins by political office holders in displays of authoritarianism”.
These personalities claim that the Government is following a revenue with electoral objectiveswhich has already been tested in other countries, “with disastrous results of more inequality, more social exclusion, more violence”, and argue that “proximity policing does not mean proximity to batons or immigrants’ faces close to the wall”.
