João Cura Mariano tries similar tack as president: ‘think of country, not yourselves…’
The president of the Supreme Court of Justice has appealed today for “the democratic maturity” of Portugal’s politicians.
Trying, very much in the same vein as president Marcelo last month, João Cura Mariano has said that the scenario of uncertainty over the viability of the next State Budget is playing havoc with the credibility of institutions as a whole.
If the country is plunged into the third legislative elections of the 1,000 days, the blow could ‘mortally wound the Supreme Court of Justice’ (the highest court in the land).
“I trust that the desirable democratic maturity of our political leaders will prevent a third dissolution of the Assembly of the Republic in a short period of time”, he said today at the swearing in ceremony of eight new counsellor judges (one of which already comes in under something of a cloud).
Cura Mariano explained that if there were to be new elections, the process would once again postpone much-needed reforms in the area of justice placing “this Supreme Court in the unprecedented situation of not having a minimum number of judges to ensure its regular functioning”.
Emphasising the pressure on the Supreme Court of Justice to constantly renew its magistrates, he described their time on the bench as equivalent to ‘the life span of a dragonfly’. To this end, the Supreme Court president said he has already sent the government a proposal for an amendment aimed at ‘urgent rejuvenation’.
“This can only be achieved with an urgent legislative change to the rules of access to the Supreme Court of Justice, which are contained in the Statute of Judicial Magistrates and therefore require the intervention of the Assembly of the Republic.
“A project has already been submitted to the government which, through a considerable widening of the range of candidates, would allow Appeal Court judges with lower ages to join the ranks of the Supreme”.
But, things as they are now – this ‘emergency situation’, as he termed it – affects the quality of jurisprudence – and another change in government could only make the predicament worse.
Cura Mariano also defended the revision of the appeals system generally, noting that counsellors spend too much time on “tasks that are proper to a secretariat or advisory service; deciding issues that are not relevant enough to justify their intervention”, pointing to the adoption of the enforcement of decisions after analysis by the first instance and appellate courts, also known as ‘double conformity’.
“The pace of modern societies does not tolerate the resolution of any conflict awaiting the lengthy processing and pronouncement of three separate instances”, he went on. Appeals to the Supreme “should be limited to the standardisation of divergent jurisprudence and to pronouncements in cases with “exceptional legal or social relevance”.
But for this to happen, legislation has to pass – and for legislation to pass, there needs to be a government/ parliament in function (not racing about the country campaigning for new elections).
The new counsellors sworn in today were Anabela Luna de Carvalho, Cristina Coelho, Teresa Albuquerque, Carlos Lobo, Rui Machado e Moura, Luís Teixeira, Jorge Raposo and Orlando Nascimento – the judge who stepped down in 2020 as president of the Lisbon Court of Appeal (TRL) following Operation Lex for alleged irregularities in the distribution of cases and who remains under investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Supreme Court.
UPDATE: as this text went up online, PS Socialist leader Pedro Nuno Santos was conceding that he wants to avoid early elections, and has found his AD counterpart’s proposal for the 2025 State Budget “centrist”, “non-radical” and “irrefusable” (as the prime minister himself has described it). A week from the moment where the budget needs to be officially presented, we are finally seeing white smoke.
Source material: LUSA
