According to the signatories, the Government is following a recipe with electoral objectives, which has already been tested in other countries, "with disastrous results of more inequality, more social exclusion, more violence"
Twenty-one personalities from the area of politics and justice accuse the Government, in an open letter to the Prime Minister, of "attacking the welfare state and the rule of law" with last week's police operation, which they consider intolerable.
The signatories of the letter released this Sunday by the newspaper Público consider it urgent to alert Luís Montenegro to the "intolerable circumstance that, 50 years after April", which brought the social state and the rule of law, the Government "has given this week unequivocal signs of not understanding the deep meaning of 'social state' or 'rule of law', hitting in heart and bone the social project of the Portuguese people inscribed in the Constitution since the conquest of democracy".
The signatories of the letter released this Sunday by the newspaper Público consider it urgent to alert Luís Montenegro to the "intolerable circumstance that, 50 years after April", which brought the social state and the rule of law, the Government "has given this week unequivocal signs of not understanding the deep meaning of 'social state' or 'rule of law', hitting in heart and bone the social project of the Portuguese people inscribed in the Constitution since the conquest of democracy".
The letter is signed by 21 personalities, most of them from the political area of the left, such as the former president of the Assembly of the Republic Augusto Santos Silva, the former Minister of Internal Administration of the PS Government Constança Urbano de Sousa, the former Secretary of State of the same tutelage Isabel Oneto, and the parliamentary leaders of the PS, Alexandra Leitão and Fabian Figueiredo, of BE.
The former president of the Constitutional Court Joaquim Sousa Ribeiro, the judge Maria João Antunes and the constitutionalist JorgeReis Novais sign the open letter, as well as the scientific coordinator of the Emigration Observatory Rui Pena Pires, the former Minister of Education Maria de Lurdes Rodrigues, the lawyer and university professor João Miranda, and the musician and activist Dino d'Santiago.
"There is a symbolic moment in which this Government's attack on the social State and the rule of law is exposed to the sun in all its crudeness, that moment that an image inscribed in our collective memory, the portrait of the people profiled by the State against the wall while in the Parliament of Portugal it was 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 leaders of the PAN, Inês de Sousa Real, of the Livre, Rui Tavares, the parliamentary leader of the Livre, Isabel Mendes Lopes, and the MEPs Ana Catarina Mendes (PS) and Catarina Martins (BE) sign the letter, as well as the former deputies António Topa Gomes, of the PSD, Manuel Loff, of the PCP, and José Leitão, of the PS, and the socialist deputy Cláudia Santos.
The signatories argue that "disproportionate police actions violate the law" and the Constitution, and consider that the image of people "profiled by dozens of police officers against the wall" according to the criterion of "their origin, the diversity of their culture or the color of their skin" recalls "times that 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 an "unacceptable exposure of people" and argue that "the way in which those people were treated unequivocally constitutes degrading treatment, prohibited 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 pins in the lapel by political office holders in displays of authoritarianism".
These personalities claim that the Government is following a recipe with electoral objectives, which 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 faces of immigrants close to the wall".