by [Former Ministry of
Internal Affairs] Rui Pereira
| __________________ |
|
The [Maddie] case reveals a
good deal of subservience,
much to the detriment of our
penal sovereignty |
| __________________ |
The Portuguese
authorities - and, in particular, the
Judiciary Police - have been used and
“abused”, in the context of
international judicial cooperation, to
carry out investigations ordered by
their British counterparts. From
chartered flights using Air Force
helicopters (to uncover, from above,
holes opened seven years ago) to the
return of the famous sniffer dogs, to
the questioning of “arguidos and
witnesses”, everything has been done to
meet the demands of our oldest allies.
But is this deference warranted?
The first question that
springs to mind is a simple one: would
the British police do the same in
similar circumstances, working at “full
speed” on the say so of the Portuguese
authorities, to fulfill the reciprocity
principle enshrined in Article 4º of the
Law 144/99? Of course not! It is
necessary to note that under the
applicable Portuguese law (the crime was
committed in national territory) there
is an ongoing process in Portugal which
has the very same purpose - which,
incidentally, was reopened under Article
279º of the Code of Criminal Procedure,
since “new elements of evidence” became
available.
Herein lies, then, the
nonsense of the situation in all its
splendour: in Portugal a criminal
investigation is taking place for the
same purpose, however our authorities
work, under an “outsourcing” regime and
in exclusivity for the “concurrent”
investigation of another country. So, in
order to prevent paradoxes of this
nature, the Article 18º of the Law
144/99 authorizes the refusal to
cooperate with another investigation
when the fact that motivates it, is
already the subject of a pending process
in Portugal. Moreover, if the process
[investigation] had not been reopened in
our country, the cooperation would be
impossible, under the Article 8º of that
same law.
This legal impossibility
leads us to a truly inconvenient final
question: since the international
judicial cooperation is impossible when
there has been a court acquittal or when
a process is archived, is it possible
that the reopening of the process had
only the (deviant) purpose to enable the
cooperation and place the police
Portuguese "“at the service” of the
British authorities? If so, then there
was “manipulation” of the process.
Nevertheless, without making
conjectures, we can safely conclude that
this case reveals a good deal of
subservience, much to the detriment of
our penal sovereignty.
in Correio
da Manhã, July 3, 2014 |
