According to the spokesperson for the Superior Council of the Judiciary, Correia Bartolomeu, the excess of preventive detention was addressed this Tuesday at the meeting of the heads of bodies involved in the administration of justice in the country.
Speaking to the press, Correia Bartolomeu said that all bodies present at the meeting were committed to developing joint work "to ensure that some excesses of preventive detention, which still exist, are effectively remedied".
Correia Bartolomeu stated that working groups will be created comprising the Public Prosecutor's Office, the judge of guarantee and lawyers, to carry out specific work in prison establishments.
"In each prison establishment and in accordance with the teams that are created, if a concrete situation of excessive pre-trial detention is identified, the team that goes to the location – such as the guarantee judge, the prosecutor, the lawyer –, proceeds precisely to issuing release warrants for those detained", he stressed.
Asked to comment on the scale of the problem, Correia Bartolomeu only stressed that "there are still some cases", without giving any numbers.
"Some cases arise from the fact that, sometimes, when the detainee is called to appear in order to be given the release order, he does not respond, and there is this difficulty, which was identified and expressed throughout the session by the various participants Let's analyze, find out why detainees, even though they are in prison, sometimes do not respond to the call", he stressed.
In May of this year, the Ad Hoc Commission on Excessive Preventive Detention met, and the secretary of this body, Alves Reneé, expressed concern about the numerous cases of excessive preventive detention and records without certificates and terms of sentence settlement existing in the country.
"Yes, in fact it is a serious matter. Exactly for this reason this commission was created, it is because it realized the existence of a phenomenon of excessive preventive detention across the country and one of the ways to mitigate it is exactly the creation of a working group", the secretary of the Ad-Hoc Commission for Analysis of Excessive Preventive Detention, Alves Reneé, told journalists at the time.
At that meeting, it was stated that Angola has almost 3000 cases of excess preventive detention and 6000 without certificates for the settlement of the sentence.
