Top judges spark pre-Christmas crisis

The approach of Christmas brings fresh worries to Portugal and its hopes of returning to something like financial stability next year.

Once again, the biggest threat to the government's efforts to exit the country’s bailout – and to the continued existence of the present government itself - comes not from politicians but judges.

The latest decision by the nation’s Constitutional Court has blocked a highly unpopular bid to cut public sector pensions. It is the fourth time judges in the highest court in the land (pictured below) have blocked government measures this year. They may do the same to plans to cut the salaries of public sector workers.

As with earlier rulings on austerity measures, the Constitutional Court judges have stymied efforts to cut spending ahead of Portugal’s planned exit from its €78 billion ($107 billion) bailout next June.

The latest decision outlawed a key measure in the 2014 budget calling for cuts of up to 10 percent in civil service pensions over €600 a month. The 13-member court unanimously declared the proposal “unconstitutional” as it was a “violation of the principle of trust.”

This brought renewed calls from street protesters as well as opposition politicians for the government’s resignation. Arménio Carlos, leader of Portugal’s largest trade union, CGTP, condemned the government’s austerity policies as “attacks on human rights.”

An ever-growing number of citizens are claiming that the coalition government is more like a dictatorship than a democratic institution and that it has lost touch with public opinion and the people’s needs. Protesters want President Aníbal Cavaco Silva to veto the controversial State Budget and call early elections.

The pension cuts would have saved an estimated €388 million, funds the government must now find elsewhere to comply with the country’s bailout deal with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The most likely alternative savings will involve hikes in VAT, which are sure to spark more public outrage.

While there is serious disenchantment with the present centre-right coalition, the question arises: would any other set of politicians in the country be able to do any better? Incompetence and inefficiency are thought to be rife in just about all sectors and at all levels of the administration and the civil service.

Portugal has so far received €71.4 billion of the bailout money it was promised. The government hopes it can follow Ireland’s lead and exit by staying on target to meet the bailout requirements and return to normal financing in the bond markets.

Not everyone is pessimistic. In the days leading up to the latest court ruling, the European Commission expressed qualified optimism that Portugal would be able to find an alternative way to meet its 2014 budget deficit target. “Such measures, however, could heighten risks to growth and employment and reduce the prospects for a sustained return to financial markets,” said a commission spokesman.

The Financial Times today quoted Charles Schulz, a senior economist with Germany’s Berenberg Bank, as saying that Portugal still had a good chance of leaving its bailout programme in June. “The economy is growing, political risks are limited and the government is reforming the economy. But the errors of the past will continue to weigh on Portugal’s prospects.”

On hearing of the court’s rejection after the first session of an EU summit in Brussels last night, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters: “It’s not an easy situation but I think Portugal will find a way to solve it.”

What do you think?

Is the government on the right track, or has it got it all wrong?Your comments below please. 

Drug law reform: a bold new initiative

Uruguay has joined Portugal in the forefront of drug law reform by becoming the first country in the world to make it legal to grow, sell and smoke marijuana.

When the law approved by the senate in Uruguay comes into force and marijuana is being grown legally within its own borders, Uruguyans over the age of 18 will be allowed to buy up to 40 grams of pot per month from licensed pharmacies.

Twelve years ago Portugal became the first country to fully decriminalise the personal use of all kinds of drugs. Decriminalising did not mean legalising. Personal use remained unlawful but was no longer regarded as a criminal offence. Trafficking or dealing remained a serious crime.

‘Quantities for personal use’ is defined as one gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, five grams of hashish or 25 grams of marijuana leaves. That is the maximum allowed for a 10-day period.

Illicit drug use in Portugal is treated as a misdemeanour that demands counselling or vocational training rather than prosecution. On the premise that addicts are ‘sick’ rather than ‘criminals,’ the solution now lies in national health centres rather than the courts and prisons.

The policy is still controversial. It seems to be working well even if not deemed an unqualified success. The number of addicts seeking rehab has gone up. The number of HIV cases among intravenous drug users has significantly dropped. Usage has not dramatically increased and Portugal has not become a haven for drug tourists. Most of the doubters have come to accept that even if it has not radically improved the situation, at least it has not made it worse.

Opponents of the law change in Uruguay claim state control will be a “social engineering experiment” likely to expose more people to a drug that critics consider more harmful than its advocates make out.

Supporters of legalising marijuana characterise it is a sensible response to the global ‘war’ on drugs that by common agreement has hopelessly failed everywhere. They believe that state control and setting the price as low as about €0.72 ($1) a gram will help push traffickers out of the market.

Although the pioneer of drug decriminalisation, Portugal has always been a dedicated partner in international efforts to curb the drug trade.

Portugal is itself on well-established intercontinental drug routes. Seizures and multinational arrests in this country are commonplace. Open borders within the European Union make the traffickers’ job easier, but the police are vigilant.

This summer, for example, Interpol supported by Europol led an operation involving 34 countries that targeted cross-Atlantic smuggling of drugs and illicit firearms. It resulted in 142 arrests, the seizure of 15 vessels, 42 guns and nearly 30 tonnes of cocaine, heroin and marijuana with an estimated value of €600 million ($822 million).

Dealing in drugs is like any other trade. It is about supply and demand and moving goods from their place of origin to the market place. Eradicating drug trafficking may be impossible, however, as it is globally so massive and secretive. Powerful cartels run by terrorist groups as well as criminal organisations, supported by money laundering involving some of the biggest banks in the world, are using poverty and the marginalisation of segments of society in Latin America, Asia and Africa to expand drug production and black economies.

Drugs generate about €300 billion ($400 billion) a year and account for about 8% of all international trade. Only time will tell if legalisation and decriminalisation at the national level can make any real dent in organised crime on such a scale.

Meanwhile, just as those with drug policy reform in mind in the United States, Britain and elsewhere have been closely following Portugal’s bold initiative, Uruguay’s ‘experiment’ is sure to be watched with great interest.

Mandela and the Portugal connection

The death of Nelson Mandela and the global outpouring of condolences to his widow evoke reminiscences of Portugal’s influence on the couple’s lives and on the history of South Africa as a whole.

Portuguese explorers in the 15^th century were the first Europeans to set foot in southern Africa. The Portuguese established initial trade links but went on to colonise neighbouring Mozambique and Angola to the east and northwest, leaving the central and southernmost territory to the Dutch and the British.

Portugal’s close association with the region continued right up to the second half of the 20th century when it played a pivotal role in the downfall of apartheid.

After Mandela’s imprisonment in 1964 on charges of inciting armed revolution, fiercely racist white politicians and security forces remained dominant in South Africa despite international condemnation of apartheid.  With one of the fastest growing economies in the world, commercial relationships thrived with the United States, Britain, France and other leading western countries.

Portugal on the other hand simply could not afford to sustain its opposition to the Russian and Chinese-backed liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola. The ‘Carnation’Revolution’ at home in 1974 was largely in opposition to the Portuguese dictatorship’s long and financially draining colonial war.

The Portuguese troop withdrawals and subsequent granting of independence to Mozambique and Angola hugely encouraged the determination of South Africa’s blacks and increasing numbers of like-minded whites.

Portugal’s exit from Africa in the second half of the 1970s gave real hope to the anti-apartheid movement spearheaded by the African National Congress of which Mandela remained an iconic figure while languishing in jail on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town.

Among the much more racially tolerant Portuguese there had never been segregation in Mozambique or Angola, but after independence many emigrants moved across the border to South Africa. They enriched the multi-cultural though increasingly tense situation there.

Overwhelming international pressure in the late 1980s led to the collapse of the laws separating whites and blacks in South Africa. In 1994, Mandela, who had served 27 years in jail, was elected the country’s first black president. There then developed a much more personal connection between Portugal’s sphere of influence and President Mandela. 

With Mozambique in the throes of a post-independence civil war between the army of the ruling Frelimo government and South African-backed Renamo rebels in 1980s, the president of Mozambique Samora Machel, a fierce opponent of the neignbouring apartheid regime,  had been killed in a still mysterious plane crash  near the border of the two countries. 

Machel’s widow, Graça, had been born into a peasant family in rural Mozambique. She won a scholarship to high school in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, but she was the only black in a class of white students.

“Why is it that I’m made to feel strange in my own country? They’re the foreigners, not me. Something is wrong here,” she remarked much later.

Another scholarship brought her to the University of Lisbon as a language student who became deeply involved in political and humanitarian issues.

On returning to Mozambique she joined Frelimo,  trained as a guerrilla fighter and became a schoolteacher, a contrasting but, as it turned out, sound preparation for her deployment as Mozambique’s first post-independence minister of education, a job she relished until well after her husband’s death.

Graça Machel first met Mandela, 27 years her senior,  soon after his release from Robben Island in 1990. In 1998, two years after Mandela’s highly publicised divorce from his second wife Winnie, Nelson and Graça married on his 80th birthday.

How ironic that two passionate rebels of different nationalities and almost different generations, both branded ‘guerrillas’ - or in modern parlance ‘terrorists’ - ended up contributing  so much to peace and reconciliation, not only in southern Africa, but across the world.

On reflection perhaps it is not so strange. As Mandela told the court before being sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realised. But, my Lord, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Oh that today’s political leaders had half that sort of moral commitment.

Is unisexism for all the way forward?

Portugal is in the middle order of world rankings when it comes to gender inequality. The gap is closing in several key areas, but there is little chance of this country ever catching up with remarkable developments in Sweden.

As one of the world’s most equal countries, Sweden has reached near parity in political representation, employment opportunities and wages. Not content with doing far more than most countries to eradicate gender discrimination, Sweden is forging ahead even further - into the uncharted territory of gender blending neutrality.

Plans are afoot to do away with gender altogether – well, almost. Just for starters, the most popular toys currently available in Sweden include sets of naked dolls in which each doll shows a different expression – a smile or a frown – but nothing that would identify it as representing a girl or a boy. 

Reporting on efforts to get rid of the idea that men and women are different, Time magazine recently noted that a growing number of Swedes are replacing their words ‘he’ (han) and ‘she’ (hon) with a new word -  hen. As unfortunate as it sounds in English, Swedish politicians are now using hen in parliament and it is routinely used in some leading newspapers.

Unisexism is not entirely new, but promoting gender neutrality on a national scale is viewed by many, even in Sweden, as feminism and political correctness gone mad. Yet Time ventured to predict that if Sweden succeeds, “the rest of the developed world may one day look at gender-neutral pronouns and gender-neutral dolls as every bit as essential to democracy as equal voting rights.”

Portugal has made very significant advances in gender equality over the past decade. That said, concerns have been raised about recent setbacks attributed to the on-going financial crisis and austerity measures.

Even if and when the good economic times return, neutrality is not going to work in this country. Expressive dolls might catch on, but the highly sexist Portuguese language is surely going to scupper unisexism.

It doesn’t make much sense to monolingual English speakers, but Portuguese nouns are either masculine or feminine - or in some cases bisexual, so to speak. The word ‘sex’ is itself masculine (sexo) with no feminine equivalent. A ‘journalist,’ whether a man or a woman, is always feminine (jornalista). The word for all sorts of people can sexually change depending on who it is describing (doutor / doutora, amigo / amiga). And just to make life a little more multifarious, any accompanying adjectives must agree with the gender of the noun.

Because of this linguistic complication, the equality focus in Portugal will probably remain on such matters as closing pay disparities (at present women doing similar work earn on average 30% less) and increasing the percentage of female members of parliament (currently just under 30%).

Among the other niggling imbalances, at last count more than 81% of Portuguese women do the laundry, 74% prepare the meals, nearly 66% wash the dishes and 63% take care of the house cleaning on their own. Men only shine when it comes to chores such as house repairs (60%), administrative tasks (41%) and shopping (39%).

Eradicating inequality in Portugal may not need legislation or feminist campaigns. It is happening naturally. Far fewer girls than boys are dropping out of school nowadays. Once largely illiterate and confined to the kitchen, women are well outstripping men in gaining university degrees and positions in traditionally male-dominated professions such as medicine and law.

The English word ‘idiot’ is almost the same in Portuguese (idiota). It is feminine and there is no masculine alternative. That is definitely going to have to change.

McCann case: Anger over new suspect

When Scotland Yard launched its Madeleine McCann investigation, it called for ‘restraint’ from the British media. Meanwhile, a Portuguese law forbids police here from divulging inside information about on-going criminal investigations. So how come newspapers in both Britain and Portugal have identified and published sensational stories about another implausible ‘prime suspect’ in this case?

The stories are causing outrage, especially among relatives of the now deceased ‘suspect,’ but also in the much wider community in Portugal.

Hard on the heels of reports in the UK that police were looking variously for a paedophile gang, foreign perverts, gypsy robbers, English cleaners and some fair-haired individuals possibly from Germany or Holland, the Portuguese tabloid Correio da Manhã last week began publishing a series of articles claiming police were investigating an African man.

The ‘new suspect’ was a former employee of the resort where the McCanns stayed in 2007. Phone records placed him near Praia da Luz at the time. As an immigrant from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, he was living with his partner and their son in the nearest town, Lagos. He was arrested in 1996 for petty theft, but had no record of any serious offence.

The Correio da Manhã stories were copied and in some cases embellished in many British and other foreign newspapers. The Daily Express, for example, claimed the suspect was “a violent thug who was a threat to children.” It gave a Portuguese ‘police profile’ as the source of this information.

In many of the regurgitated reports, Portuguese detectives were said to be examining the possibility that the ‘suspect’ had kidnapped Madeleine in an act of revenge against his former employers for his dismissal a year earlier.

This idea made no sense at all, said the brother of the Cape Verdean's Portuguese partner. “It wasn’t as if what happened there with him losing his job destroyed his life. He got work elsewhere soon afterwards.”

A Portuguese TV reporter calmly and sensibly described the recently discovered information about the man’s cell phone use as “a loose end that needs to be tied up.”  

But the British tabloids went overboard. More personal details about the man emerged, including his name. The Daily Mirror published a close-up photograph - but of course he looked nothing like either of the five-year-old e-fit images released by Scotland Yard three weeks ago.

The ‘new suspect’ died in a tractor accident in the north of Portugal in 2009, two years after Madeleine disappeared. There is that old saying, “you can’t defame the dead,”  but what about the torment and humiliation these stories have inflicted upon those left behind?

This again raises serious questions about the workings and integrity of both the press and the police. How and why did details of this individual and the Polícia Judiciária’s interest in him become available? Has this man really become ‘key’ to the investigation, or is something else afoot here?

The  ‘suspect’s’ widow told the Portuguese weekly newspaper, Sol: “It is disgusting that they are now trying to set up a dead man as a scapegoat.”

The Federation of the Organisations of Cape Verde based in Lisbon also believes the dead man is being used as a scapegoat. It described the allegations against him as “shocking” and “not credible.”

The truth about this matter needs to be told. Sadly, the truth about many aspects of this extraordinary six and a half year old mystery is as cloudy as ever.

Animal lovers fear new watchdogs

SATIREDAY EXCLUSIVE

The Portuguese government is believed to have entered into a secret bilateral agreement with the United States over the sharing of sensitive personal data. Sources say the agreement focuses mainly on material gathered by the US National Security Agency (NSA) relating to animals in apartments.

In addition to intercepting millions of phone calls, text and email messages each month, it is thought that NSA may be priming satellite cameras to feed images to the Portuguese police.

The revelation coincides with leaked information that the Portuguese government  wants to introduce a ‘Pet Code’ that would restrict the numbers of animals in any one apartment to two dogs and four cats.

While officials this week tried to play down the proposed new law, it has sparked public outrage. Many have expressed concern that it smacks of pre-1974 revolution elitism because owners of houses will not be affected, only apartment-dwellers who tend to be the less well-off.

It has also been described as “blatant discrimination” because the new law is expected to apply to dogs and cats but leave apartment-dwellers  to keep as many pet pigs or boa constrictors as they like. It is also seen as another example of inequality as the number of dogs are expected to be limited to two whether they are chihuahuas or great Danes.

“It is the thin end of the wedge,” added Fido Basset, president of the Association of Foreign Pet Owners in Portugal. “They will start with cats and dogs and before you know it we will have to cut down on the  number of white mice, budgies and goldfish we can keep.

Animal lovers are hoping the global indignation at NSA’s spying in allied countries will prevent any new bilateral arrangement with Portugal going ahead and thus make the Pet Code unworkable. 

More bizarre twists in McCann saga

It turns out that Kate and Gerry McCann suppressed for five years ‘critical evidence’ that became the centrepiece of the recent BBC Crimewatch programme on the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine.

Findings by ex-MI5 agents long kept under wraps by the McCanns included the two e-fit images described in the Crimwatch programme by Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood as of “vital importance.”

The images are of a suspected kidnapper seen by an Irish family in Praia da Luz the night Madeleine went missing.

They were given to the McCanns by a handpicked team of investigators from Oakley International hired by the McCanns’ Find Madeleine fund in 2008.

Henri Exton, an MI5’s former undercover operations chief who led the team, told the Sunday Times he was “utterly stunned” when he watched the Crimewatch programme and saw the evidence he had passed to the McCanns presented as a new breakthrough.

He said the fund had silenced his team with a lawyer’s letter binding them to the confidentiality of a report they had compiled that contained controversial findings. Mr Exton said the legal threat had prevented them from handing over the report to Scotland Yard’s investigation until detectives had obtained written permission from the fund.

The Oakley International report, delivered in November 2008, gave little credibility to Jane Tanner’s 9.15pm sighting and focused instead on the 10pm sighting by the Irish Smith family. The investigators recommended that their e-fit images be released without delay.

For some reason the images were not published even in Kate McCann’s 2011 book Madeleine, though it devoted a whole section to eight “key sightings” and carried e-fits on all of them except the Smiths’.

In its Insight report, the Sunday Times quoted one of the Oakley International investigators as saying: “I was absolutely stunned when I watched the programme . . . It most certainly wasn’t a new timeline and it certainly isn’t a new revelation. It is absolute nonsense to suggest either of those things . . . And those e-fits you saw on Crimewatch are ours.”

The hushed-up report is said to have questioned parts of the McCanns’ evidence, contained sensitive information about Madeleine’s sleeping patterns and raised the highly sensitive possibility that she could have died in an accident after leaving the apartment herself from one of two unsecured doors.

The Sunday Times quoted a source close to the Find Madeleine fund as saying the report was considered “hypercritical of the people involved” and “would have been completely distracting” if it became public.

In fact, the Portuguese lead detective Gonçalo Amaral considered the Irish sighting to be very important back in May 2007 when the Smith family first reported it to the Policía Judiciária. Details of the sighting and ‘hypercritical information’ were in the public domain early in January 2008, three months before the Oakley team arrived on the scene.

Ebullience at the huge response to their Crimewatch programme turned to embarrassment in certain quarters when it was revealed yesterday that the BBC had cast a porn star in the ‘reconstruction’ of events the night Madeleine disappeared.

With such films as ‘Tight Rider,’ ‘Dr Screw’ and ‘From Dusk Till Porn’ on his CV, the actor Mark Sloan was engaged by the BBC to represent one of the McCanns’ holidaying friends with whom they dined each night, Dr Matt Oldfield.

 “How could the casting director not know of his background when they picked him? It’s all over Google. Did no one check? It is unbelievably stupid,” an agent, who did not wish to be named, told the Daily Star.

Meanwhile, although a new Portuguese police investigation only became official last week, a PJ team in Oporto in the north of Portugal has been reviewing the case for some time, and another PJ team in Faro in the Algarve has been assisting Scotland Yard with their inquiries. It is believed that the new Portuguese investigation will be conducted by group of PJ detectives working independently of Scotland Yard.

Things seem to be hotting up, though there is still no end to the mystery in sight.

*  The Sunday Times published the following apology to Kate and Gerry McCann and Madeleine's Fund on 28 December 2013.
“In articles dated October 23 ("Madeleine clues hidden for 5 years" and "Investigators had E-Fits five years ago", News) we referred to efits which were included in a report prepared by private investigators for the McCanns and the Fund in 2008. We accept that the articles may have been understood to suggest that the McCanns had withheld information from the authorities. This was not the case. We now understand and accept that the efits had been provided to the Portuguese and Leicestershire police by October 2009. We also understand that a copy of the final report including the efits was passed to the Metropolitan police in August 2011, shortly after it commenced its review. We apologise for the distress caused.”