The aim is the professionalization of specialists based on academic training and professional experience, stated Ricardo Dinis Oliveira.
“The term expert has become trivialized, so it’s necessary for these professionals to be recognized and certified, having their own status and a professional order to regulate the activity,” he insisted, considering that this will enhance the quality of investigations reaching the courts.
These are some of the issues to be discussed between Thursday and Friday at the VII Congress of the Portuguese Association of Forensic Sciences, held at the School of Health of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, in Porto.
Ricardo Dinis Oliveira, also a professor at the University Institute of Health Sciences — CESPU and coordinator of the Bachelor’s degree in Forensic Sciences, emphasized that forensic experts have training in dactyloscopy, genetics, toxicology, ballistics, explosive fires, entomology, and anthropology, stating it’s “essential to distinguish the wheat from the chaff” and not allow criminal investigations and other legal domains to be conducted by people without the proper certification or professional quality.
For the president of the Portuguese Association of Forensic Sciences, having a specific status will dignify the quality of expert reports because society has started demanding a different approach regarding forensic activity.
Ricardo Dinis Oliveira pointed out that education and health have evolved, but the quality of expert reports has not evolved to the same extent.
“Expert reports cannot be performed by those who are not forensic specialists, nor by anyone without the proper training,” he insisted.
The Portuguese Association of Forensic Sciences “was the embryo” for defining the professional status and the conditions of practice, encouraging and promoting forensic reports based on scientific evidence and technological development, he noted.
“We now intend to bring the proposal for the creation of a professional order of forensic specialists to the Assembly of the Republic,” he said.
Forensic Science already has about three dozen subspecialties, ranging from toxicology, entomology, road accidentology, dactyloscopy, anthropology, genetics, to ballistics, he explained.
Aiming for public recognition of the profession and certification of specialists in these highly technical areas, the association developed, in recent years and with the support of the first PhD specialists in the various subspecialties in the country, a set of guidelines defining the general competencies and ethical code of the forensic specialist, he added.
Ricardo Dinis Oliveira mentioned that the specific elaboration of the competencies of these approximately 30 subspecialties is already in an advanced stage.
