Family’s lawyer to appeal court’s intention to bar press and public from hearing
The decision by Aveiro court to hear the murder trial of still-missing-pregnant mother Mónica Silva behind closed doors has outraged her family, and the wider syndicate of journalists.
While the family’s lawyer, António Falé de Carvalho, sets about appealing the decision, the journalists’ syndicate has decried it as “an affront to press freedom”.
If this trial goes ahead as the judges have so deemed, it will be the first murder trial in recent Portuguese history to have this sort of treatment, say reports. Ostensibly, the decision was made to ‘protect third parties, and their intimate lives’ (which initially were taken to be the missing pregnant mother’s surviving children). But now it seems the description includes Ms Silva’s other sexual partners.
António Falé de Carvalho believes the court has “gone too far”, particularly as these days, he says, the old tabus concerning women “who have sexual relations with other men”, have long gone.
In other words, the contention is that the judges’ decision to hold the trial behind closed doors may be more geared to protecting the identities of these ‘other men’, than protecting the sensibilities of Ms Silva’s two children.
In Falé de Carvalho’s understanding, there is nothing to stop the trial beginning as planned on May 19 while the appeal process goes through the necessary channels. But if the appeal is successful, he believes the trial would have to start all over again.
As for the Syndicate of Journalists, it sees the court’s decision as “offensive and serious” as well as “unacceptable”. The gist of the syndicate’s statement is that it sees the court’s plan to issue “regular notes” on the progress of proceedings as a form of ‘selecting information to be made available to citizens’. “This action has a form of controlling information”, says the syndicate, suggesting this could lead to “citizens’ distrust” of the judgement that will be handed down, and even of “the courts themselves”.
The statement queries whether journalists who “want to fulfil their professional duty” by finding out details of the trial, “which is a collective right enshrined in the Constitution”, can expect to find themselves the subject of proceedings for disobedience.
Fernando Valente has been accused of murdering Ms Silva and her unborn child, and of disposing of the body in such a way that no-one yet has managed to discover where it is. ND
Sources: Observador/ SIC Notícias
