Mário Cruz / Lusa
The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (D), accompanied by the Prime Minister, António Costa (L)
President of the Republic left a warning of “consequences for the future”. Now, “the lesson remains for history”.
The President of the Republic said this Friday that the case should remain as “a lesson” for history on the functioning of justice and admitted that all Portuguese “want to know what happened”.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa began by pointing out that he knows “little” because he was “busy all day”, but said that what he heard “is that the Attorney General’s Office came forward with a clarification in which it recognized that there was lapses, technical errorstherefore the law will not have been complied with as it should have been fulfilled”, he said, speaking to the press at the end of a state visit to Monaco.
“The feeling we have is that in what happened, the law was not applied as it should have been applied”, he pointed out: “And this in relation to any citizen, but in relation to a prime minister it naturally has a greater incidence and gravity”.
“There will be the opportunity to better understand what happened and, above all, to remove a consequence for the future”, warned Marcelo. “And this consequence is that, if the law is not complied with, this it shouldn’t happen again not future.”
Noting that, “apparently”, some of the more than 20 wiretaps on the former Prime Minister only arrived after he had already left office, while “others had not arrived due to a technical error, or an oversight or any other problem”, the President of the Republic defended that this case “cannot fail to be a lesson for the future in terms of how justice should work”.
“Now, in fact, the lesson remains for history. And the lesson is very simple: it is that there are rules that say that wiretapping a prime minister must be validated by the Supreme Court of Justice and that this must happen while he is prime minister. In principle, this must be the case, otherwise the idea of validation in the exercise of certain functions loses its usefulness”, he declared.
António Costa’s defense reiterated that the Public Ministry must clarify the reason why the wiretaps involving the former prime minister were not detected and sent to the Supreme Court of Justice. The secretary general of the PS considered that the attorney general of the Republic “must provide complete explanations” to the country about the wiretaps.
The Minister of Justice refused to talk about the wiretaps related to the former prime minister, guaranteeing that the Attorney General of the Republic “will not fail to take the measures he deems necessary” if he finds irregularities.
