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The constitutional revision project presented by Chega was accepted this Friday by the President of the Assembly of the Republic. This means that the other parties now have 30 days to present their projects and within a month an eventual Constitutional Review Commission will be constituted to open the legislative process, announces the order of Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues published by his office.
Ferro Rodrigues’ admission decision follows the opinion that he asked the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees and concluded that it does not have supervisory powers to “preventively evaluate the constitutionality of a constitutional review project” and that “it does not it corresponds to the Assembly of the Republic, however flagrant the unconstitutionality of a revision project may be, to prohibit it by means of a preventive allegation of violation of the fundamental law ”. The opinion of the commission prepared by the socialist Isabel Moreira also considered that “the seat to issue such judgments is that of a possible review commission, when justifying the vote.”
The president of the Assembly of the Republic emphasizes that he asked the commission for an opinion because he had “reasonable doubts” about whether the content of the Chega project would violate the Constitution or not by “affecting the list of material limits for review and some of the principles protected by the same Limits. “In fact, André Ventura’s text proposes to end with article 288 of the Constitution, which contemplates precisely the material limits of the revision that” a part of the doctrine [considera] he cannot be removed ”in constitutional review, argues Ferro Rodrigues. In other words, Ventura wants to finish an article in which the Constitution establishes the limits within which it must be revised, leaving this revision to have no objectives.
Among the proposed measures are life imprisonment, the creation of the penalty of chemical or physical castration for those convicted of crimes of rape or sexual abuse of minors, the limitation of the positions of prime minister and minister to those who have original Portuguese nationality. , the elimination of material limits on the revision of the Constitution itself or the withdrawal of the term “republic” in reference to Portugal.
In the text of the order, Ferro Rodrigues quotes the constitutionalists Gomes Canotilho and Vital Moreira to affirm that as president of the Assembly of the Republic he is “obliged not to admit initiatives that violate the Constitution or the principles enshrined in it.” And he maintains that the constitutionalists Jorge Miranda and Rui Medeiros also admit “the possibility that a constitutional revision project may be rejected for non-compliance with formal requirements.”
Although this is the philosophy of someone who is considered the “father” of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, Ferro Rodrigues then resorts to “precaution” to justify himself, given the “reasonable doubts about the content” of the Chega project: “I think the power to reject an initiative must be exercised with the utmost caution, with due respect for the constitutionally recognized powers of initiative ”.
Therefore, taking into account the opinion of the commission, which understood that Parliament cannot prohibit the admission of any draft constitutional revision, as well as the “different positions defended by some constitutionalists in this regard, I believe that the special complexity of the issue of the revisibility of material review limits warns that a constitutional review initiative that does not respect these same limits should not be rejected, although obviously, as is the case ”.
Chega had already delivered a draft constitutional revision in March that was much smaller than the current one, but ended up withdrawing it due to the declaration of a state of emergency. At the time, the PSD had admitted that it only intended to go ahead with its own project at the end of the legislative session, that is, last June or July, or at the beginning of the current one.
The article on the material limits of the review establishes that constitutional review laws must respect, among other principles, national independence and the unity of the State; the republican form of government; the separation of churches from the state; rights, freedoms and guarantees of citizens; workers ‘rights, workers’ commissions and union associations; the coexistence of the public, private, cooperative and social sectors owned by the means of production; universal, direct, secret and periodic suffrage and the proportional representation system; pluralism of expression and political organization and the right of democratic opposition; the separation and interdependence of sovereign bodies; inspection of constitutionality; the independence of the courts; the autonomy of local authorities and the political and administrative autonomy of the archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira.
