תאריך בפורטוגל
Clock Icon

Mandate as Attorney General? “History will take charge of characterizing and evaluating”

Mandate as Attorney General? “History will take charge of characterizing and evaluating”

Mandate as Attorney General? "History will take charge of characterizing and evaluating"

At the swearing-in ceremony of about 70 new deputy attorneys general (PGA), which took place this afternoon in the gardens of the Attorney General’s Office in Lisbon, Lucília Gago, who emphasized that this would “presumably be the last official ceremony” she would preside over, gave an overview of her six-year mandate.

The mandate ends in October, but before that, the Attorney General will be heard in parliament next week, following months of strong criticism and controversy in the wake of high-profile cases such as Operation Influencer and the Madeira case, in which the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s activities were questioned.

“History, with the essential distance, will take charge of characterizing and evaluating the period from late 2018 to October that now looms, including everything that in the area of justice and in the activity of the Public Prosecutor’s Office it contained as unique, for the best and worst reasons,” said Lucília Gago to the audience of newly sworn-in PGAs.

A week before being heard in parliament, the Attorney General delivered a harsh speech directed at critics of the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s activities, expressing “a mixture of surprise and cautious joy” at noting “the sudden and very recent interest that the activity of the Public Prosecutor’s Office as a whole seems to arouse today.”

In the “twilight [of her mandate] and on the threshold of new times,” Lucília Gago said she identified in the eyes of the magistrates before her “the revival of hope for effective recognition of the essentiality of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in the architecture of the system, with all that is implicit in that recognition,” but not only that.

“I also clearly identify in those eyes the hope for the rejection of the mirage pointed out by some of ill-considered reforms in terms of content and unpredictable in terms of results, in the wake of the rumbling drums of ignorance and superficiality or of a contagious and reckless slander rooted in perfidious designs,” she said, also expressing the desire that “this hope will not be disappointed.”

Regarding the “sudden interest” in the activities of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Attorney General mentioned that “some vehemently make impetuous and inflamed allusions to the need for accountability, which they insist neither this magistracy nor its leadership are exempt from.”

“And indeed it should be and is and has always been so,” said Lucília Gago, recalling the inspections that magistrates are subject to, evaluating the “adequacy and quality” of performance and imposing disciplinary responsibility when applicable, but also the annual activity reports of the Public Prosecutor’s Office “whose reading enables (…) the adoption of measures by those who have the competence to do so” to improve the quality of Justice.

The Attorney General lamented that “this sudden interest recently manifested had not erupted earlier, allowing namely the deepening of the reasons that have not been allowing the completion of complex and relevant criminal investigations in a substantially shorter time frame and, above all, contributing to overcoming the closure of constraints that have long and regrettably hindered this.”

She also criticized that the interest in the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s activities does not go beyond the criminal area and some “cases of special media interest due to the quality or notoriety of those involved.”

Leave a Reply

Here you can search for anything you want

Everything that is hot also happens in our social networks