CHEGA leader André Ventura has had a bitter-sweet last 24-hours: first he heard that the case against him for using ‘controversial’ election posters during the recent presidential campaign has been archived, but then he saw his appeal against a court order to take them down overturned.
In other words: there is no case to answer regarding offending slogans: “This is not Bangladesh”, “Gypsies must comply with the law” and “Immigrants should not live on subsidies” – but Lisbon judges still find them offensive enough to take down…
For Ventura, this is now a matter for the Constitutional Court – and if he doesn’t get the answer he wants from that, he will go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.
“Freedom of the press is freedom of the press, freedom of expression is freedom of expression, political freedom is political freedom; it is no different in a criminal case than in a civil case,” he argues.
Ventura’s posters exasperated people of all political persuasions when they went up last October – but the reality is that public prosecutors cannot see their messages as ‘incitements to hatred’ or ‘threats against minorities’ (as associations that sought to prosecute Ventura claimed they were).
Thus, the fact that Lisbon’s Court of Appeal has upheld the earlier decision ordering the posters’ removal is, according to Ventura, “a genuine form of veiled censorship” and a “disservice to freedom and democracy”.
He also stated the obvious: the statement ‘gypsies must obey the law’ is fact: gypsies, like everyone else in Portugal, are expected to obey the law…
The court’s decision therefore sets “a legal precedent (…) far too serious to go unnoticed”, says the far-right politician whose bid for the presidency reached the ‘second round’, only to fall to the current incumbent.
Source material: LUSA
