At 68 years old and with a legal career that began in 1980, this lawyer has specialized in the last two decades in combating human rights abuses by the justice system in Portugal, defending hundreds of inmates and detainees, almost always due to the degraded conditions of many national prisons, excessive pre-trial detention times, or the lack of timely response from courts.
“Justice in Portugal doesn’t work, and when it does, it works very poorly. Portugal doesn’t respect the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s the mother of all laws and the entire legal order in Europe,” he says, recalling the first cases he personally delivered in Strasbourg or his first victory: the case of a young woman burned with a flaming shot, where national justice acquitted the bar employee, only for the ECHR to later rule in her favor and impose compensation from the State to the young woman.
Currently established in Torres Vedras, Vítor Carreto has worked in civil law, family law, administrative law, and criminal law, spending more time in the latter area. It was from here that he acquired privileged knowledge of the prison system’s reality, which translated into hundreds of cases before the ECHR.
According to a survey conducted by Lusa in the institution’s database, the sum of nearly 40 cases he has won since 2012 (the search doesn’t show earlier results) amounts to more than half a million euros in compensation (at least 511,000 euros) to be paid by the State, an amount that doesn’t surprise him and that he believes will only grow.
“I’m not surprised because Portuguese justice gets what it deserves. Portugal likes to receive money from Europe but doesn’t like to follow the rules from Brussels and Strasbourg. I wish there were 1,000 or 5,000 lawyers filing complaints against Portugal in the European Court. Portugal will be condemned many times until it changes the system,” Vítor Carreto told Lusa.
Critical of the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s functioning, from which he demands greater speed and removal from courts, Vítor Carreto denounces a “criminal promiscuity” between prosecutors and judges, especially in the application of pre-trial detention. It’s in this area that he awaits a decision from the ECHR regarding dozens of cases he presented, which will have the force of jurisprudence.
“They arrest the person to weaken and depersonalize them. The Public Prosecutor’s Office dominates the criminal process, and the judges are a kind of notaries who stamp and agree with everything. At the moment, I have about 100 to 120 pending cases (only) for abuse of pre-trial detention. I hope a decision will come that forces Portugal to review the system,” the lawyer criticizes.
Vítor Carreto, who has been involved in high-profile cases such as the Iraqi brothers accused of war crimes or the drug trafficker Franclim Lobo, considers that the prison system “is bankrupt” and is skeptical about the rehabilitation capabilities of national prisons, advocating for a paradigm shift.
“It would be preferable to have two good prisons that work well and the rest be psychiatrists and psychologists treating people to recover them for society. Crime is an evil. And that evil must be fought with good, not by keeping the prisoner in a warehouse in inhumane conditions and living with rats, cockroaches, fleas, and bedbugs,” he stresses, lamenting the “lack of humanism, dignity, respect, common sense, and balance” in Portuguese justice.
Fatigue and age are already apparent in his voice and words, but the lawyer guarantees that he won’t stop fighting for human rights: “I started in 2004, never stopped, and will continue as long as my health allows.”
