Joel Leonardo mentioned, in the opening speech of the meeting of the heads of bodies involved in the administration of national justice, that, since May 2023, the date on which guarantee judges began their duties, around 30 thousand cases and judicial files have been resolved.
"We registered around 17 thousand release warrants and 16 thousand arrest warrants", said Joel Leonardo, also presiding judge of the Supreme Court of Angola, considering the numbers "quite positive".
"[Still,] we need to increasingly fine-tune the performance of support units for guarantee judges," he added.
Speaking to the press, the CSMJ spokesperson, Correia Bartolomeu, said that the effectiveness of the guarantee judge, in office for a year, is 90 percent and that the benefits were "unequivocal"
However, there are still some constraints, namely the distance at which some detainees are located and the scarcity of material and human resources, he pointed out.
Correia Bartolomeu said that the participants analyzed the possibility of defining action strategies to mitigate "these still negative effects, which undermine the good functioning of guarantee judges".
According to the CSMJ spokesperson, it is up to the executive to create better conditions, "whether in material means – vehicles – or also in equipment, to create conditions for travel, but also for work, so that judges and other stakeholders can develop their tasks."
In his intervention, the president of the CSMJ also defended criminal proceedings for all those involved in cases of vandalization of public property, calling for the rapid treatment of cases involving damage to railway lines, water pipes, cables and public network cabins, train windows, solar panels, among others.
Regarding this issue, Correia Bartolomeu stressed that the slowness of these processes arises "from the tradition of processing processes".
"Justice is not done with the naked eye, justice is done according to the existence of objective conditions so that sufficient evidence is produced to attribute certain responsibilities, this presupposes a process of instruction, of investigation, which sometimes takes some time," he stressed.
The executive submitted to the National Assembly the Proposed Law on Crimes of Vandalism of Public Goods and Services, which proposes punishments ranging between three and 25 years in prison for this type of crime.
The Ombudsman's Office presented, at this Tuesday's meeting, a proposal on the need to institutionalize the public defender, a right provided for in the Constitution.
According to Correia Bartolomeu, this topic was the subject of analysis "so that this figure can be improved to come into operation, as a reinforcement of the guarantees of justice".
