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According to the ruling issued by the Lisbon Court of Appeal last Wednesday, the isolation or quarantine orders issued by the health authorities during the state of alert were illegal, Jornal de Notícias writes today.
The decision, adopted by judges Margarida Ramos de Almeida and Ana Paramés, is that only a judicial authority or the regulations in force in states of emergency or siege issued by Parliament can grant health authorities these powers to restrict the freedom of citizens. .
The Lisbon Court of Appeal was summoned to resolve an appeal filed by the Azores Regional Health Administration (ARS) on a request for the immediate release of four German tourists forced by the local health authority to carry out prophylactic isolation in a hotel room in Azores, in August.
Subsequently, the court ratified the decision taken in the first instance, which freed the tourists, and made their isolation illegal, extending this illegality to all other decisions made by the country’s ARS in cases in which they determined the prophylactic isolation of citizens.
In the sentence to which Jornal de Notícias had access, it is read that “nThe truth, in view of the Constitution and the Law, the health authorities do not have the power or the legitimacy to deprive anyone of their freedom, not even under the label of ‘confinement’, which effectively corresponds to detention, since such This decision can only be determined or validated by the judicial authority, that is, the exclusive competence, in view of the law that still governs us, to order or validate such deprivation of liberty, is exclusively entrusted to an autonomous power, the Judicial Power ” .
The magistrates responsible for issuing the judicial opinion, furthermore, not only considered that the order to deprive a person of liberty under the pretext of a form of imprisonment without going against the framework provided by law constitutes “an illegal detention, by of an incompetent entity and because motivated by the fact that the law does not allow it ”, since they also questioned the reliability of the PCR tests, considering their results insufficient to constitute a justification for a quarantine.
The decision of the Lisbon Court of Appeal promises to generate waves, but it is not the first time that the judiciary has collided with health authorities during the pandemic. On August 5, it was learned that the Constitutional Court determined that the Azorean authorities had violated the Constitution by imposing a mandatory 14-day quarantine on those who arrived in the region due to the covid-19 pandemic.
The decision came as a result of an appeal by the Public Ministry (MP) to a judicial decision to release a man who complained about the quarantine imposed.
After the decision of the court of first instance, the MP appealed to the TC, but the judges of the Raton Palace considered, in the decision of July 31, that “all the disciplinary norms of a right to freedom or guarantee require the prior authorization of the Assembly of the Republic ”, a requirement that“ takes on special relevance when understanding or conditions of a right are at stake ”.
