According to the preliminary report of the audit requested to investigate the processes of prior communication, after the dissemination of activist data to third countries was known, the consulate and embassy of Angola were informed a total of nine times about promoters of demonstrations in the city of Lisbon.
In 2015, the Lisbon municipality notified the consulate and embassy four times due to gatherings in solidarity with young Angolan activists arrested in Luanda, known as 'revus', which include Luaty Beirão, the most media-friendly of the group who went on a protest hunger strike.
In 2021, the embassy was notified for one occasion, regarding a demonstration of citizens "not conformed with the socio-political framework of Angola," according to the city council report to which Lusa had access.
In 2020, three demonstrations for democracy and to demand the "fulfillment of the electoral political program" were objects of notification.
Besides Angola, the report gave information about demonstrators to diplomatic representations of other Portuguese-speaking countries, especially Brazil, on eight occasions.
According to the chamber services, the demonstrations were more diverse, from issues of delays in consular procedures and protest actions against the current Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, or former head of state Dilma Rousseff.
Guinea-Bissau (three times), São Tomé and Príncipe (1) and Mozambique (1) are other countries that have been notified of protest actions in Lisbon.
On Wednesday night, the municipality of Lisbon released the preliminary report of the audit requested to investigate the processes of prior notification, after the disclosure of data from activists to embassies, including Russia, was known, which generated criticism from various political forces and human rights organizations.
The report explains that in 2012, following the publication of legislation on the processing of notices of demonstrations, the City of Lisbon drew up a protocol for handling these data, which states the need for the municipality to communicate to embassies the occurrence of demonstrations.
However, the "protocol in question is not clear in relation to the content of what should be communicated to embassies, although it has been interpreted by the services in the sense that the notices themselves, in their entirety, should be sent", explains the preliminary document.
Lisbon City Hall has not yet been able to ascertain the reasons for the persistence of this practice despite the changes introduced in 2013, but added that the practice remained "in force in a relatively uniform manner, and was applied to the various requests for demonstrations".
In some circumstances it was found that the communication about demonstrations "was not only forwarded to the embassies near which the demonstration was to take place, but also, and essentially from 2018, to those related to the object of the demonstration."
