The debate in Portugal regarding reforms in criminal justice has been lively. After actions by the prosecutor's office that targeted politicians, they woke up to the fact that there are abuses that must be stopped through legislative changes. The Jewish community of Oporto decided to contribute to this debate and wrote to the Minister of Justice and Parliamentary Leaders the message that can be read in full below.

Porto, 14 July 2024.

To the Justice Minister,

To the Leaders of the Parliamentary Groups,

Within the context of the public petitions clamoring for criminal procedural justice, the Jewish Community of Oporto would like to provide the following contributions:

1. The public “statements” or communiqués issued by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and by the police institutions should be duly regulated. People and institutions are often branded with many types of crimes despite the lack of minimally consistent empirical data in the processes in which they are charged.

2. The prohibition of police attacks not preceded by any prior investigation worthy of the name should be reinforced. The only objective crimes in such cases are often the public “statements” themselves, often preceded by illegal searches, illegal seizures, illegal detentions, the constitution of illegal defendants and so on.

3. At the most, said “statements” should recount the actual findings according to existing evidence, i.e., indicators possessed of some objectivity and verisimilitude, and not spread destructive abstractions baptized as findings, imposing silence of those targeted through “legal confidentiality”. In the last resort, the alleged findings invoked by the Public Prosecutor’s office should be publicly shared, to bind the office to what it has written, thus avoiding that years later, without any apology, it proudly presents new theories based on the material from which it illegally seized. This must end.

4. We recall two public “statements”, dated 11.03.2022 and 14.07.2022, that charged our 100-year old community and its services with the crimes of criminal association, corruption, influence trafficking, drug trafficking, forgery, tax fraud and money laundering, all colored by the identification of the articles in the criminal code, to lend everything a serious air.

5. We recall that two and a half years later the criminal association was fiction; the drugs could only regard the person who produced the statement (no doubt experiencing an accidental state of disability); corruption and influence trafficking targeted relations with registry offices that never existed even once; forgery, tax fraud and money laundering related to a French multimillionaire who had rightly been certified by another community and to a Russian who paid the 250 euro emolument and fulfilled the legal requirements.

6. The word “findings” should be strictly defined, so that wishes can never act as triggers for searches to be carried out in people’s homes and even in cultural and religious institutions, without forgetting a synagogue, something that had not occurred in Europe since World War Two and would have been impossible even in the Congo. Two lawsuits are already in place at the European Court of Human of Human Rights regarding said searches, that were requested, ordered and executed by those who confused “findings” with anonymous, abstract and even impossible slanderous denunciations.

7. It's not reasonable that through illegal searches, other illegal measures are carried out, namely seizures (or rather armed robberies), often involving millions of documents and communications, in order to find something conducive to new theories or that at least works to disparage the targets, meanwhile fallen in disgrace in public. “We must find something, anything to get this thing going! We shall not apologize!”

Yours sincerely,

For and on behalf of the Board of Directors