The Superior Council of the Judiciary organized this Friday a meeting to prepare the start-up of guarantee judges throughout the national territory, attended by its president, advisor judge Joel Leonardo, the Minister of the Interior, Eugénio Laborinho, Public Prosecutor General of the Republic, Hélder Pita Grós, and the President of the Bar Association, Luís Monteiro.
According to Correia Bartolomeu, member of the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSMJ) and spokesman, among the powers of the guarantee judge are, for example, decreeing preventive detention, house arrest and interdiction to leave the country, acts practiced until now by the Public Prosecutor's Office and which will come under its competence.
Initially, 158 guarantee judges will be distributed throughout the country, a number that should grow according to procedural needs.
At the opening of the meeting, Joel Leonardo, stressed that all procedural actors – police bodies, Public Prosecutor's Office and courts – need to be interconnected and work in an articulated way for the smooth processing of processes.
"It is therefore necessary, within the framework of the interdependence of functions, that the intervening parties find spaces for dialogue and meeting points and this is the opportunity offered to them due to the capital importance of the figure of guarantee judges in the protection of the rights of citizens," he said.
The Deputy Attorney General of the Republic, Africano Gamboa reinforced, at the end of the meeting, that the function of the judge to guarantee is to watch over the rights and freedoms of citizens.
"Nothing that is not done, since it is the obligation of all those involved in justice, but with the approval of the new penal codes and criminal procedure we have adopted a model in which there is a judicial authority exclusively dedicated to this function", he explained.
The law distinguishes between coercive measures that can be applied directly by the Public Ministry and those that require the signature of the guarantee judge, taking into account the seriousness of the measure that is intended to be applied, as is the case of preventive detention, added the official.
