Living in Portugal-2
I’m going to start at a point which most people may consider to be odd, but I maintain it is the most important aspect of life in Portugal. There is no such thing here as what we in England call The Rule of Law. That is not important if you can manage to get through your time here without having an argument with anybody. The moment you come up against a problem you will find you are stuffed right from the outset.
Let me clarify what I mean by The Rule of Law.
Most countries have some kind of legal structure upon which all legal process, all rights and obligations, and the rules for business and personal interaction are based. In the UK that structure is based upon what we call Common Law, which is a body of traditions, and legal decisions that have been made over the centuries, and are codified in case law. It has been further codified back in the nineties with the introduction of the Bill of Human Rights, which is based upon a general set of premises which have been agreed by the EU governments as being common ground throughout the union.
One of the fundamental tenets of The Rule of Law is the idea that all persons are equal under the law. If you cant park on this particular stretch of road that means I cant either, neither can the local judge or a policeman or a politician. That is not how things are in Portugal. The government has signed the protocol, but there are certain laws and customs in Portugal which are in opposition to this fundamental attitude.
If you are a lawyer or a policeman then you are protected from criticism. It is a criminal offense to criticise a lawyer. You can go to prison if found guilty. That means there is effectively no such thing in Portugal as professional indemnity insurance. If you pay your lawyers vast sums of money to give you good advice, and they are negligent, you cant sue them. If you do you could end up in jail. That goes against all the protocols the English have taken for granted over the centuries, and it goes against the EU Statute of Human Rights. In short you have no real fundamental rights in Portugal.
It cuts a different swathe through rather a lot of processes that those of us from other countries have taken for granted. I am looking at a letter from an upset couple who have been charged extortionate sums of money for their water supply. They can complain, but their complaints are met with indifference. The water authority can effectively charge what they like, completely screw up the bill, then can cut off their water supply and empty the client’s bank account, and there is nothing the poor folks can do about it.
Since when can an individual (a company is, by law an individual as well) put their hand in your pocket and take out money without a court order? In Portugal if they are part of the government they most certainly can. That is in direct contravention of the Bill of Human Rights which states that everyone is entitled to have their complaints heard in a court of law. But how can you be heard in a court of law if the law says that taking such action is a criminal offense?
That one aspect of custom in Portugal is the one reason why no-one should come to live here or start any kind of business here, because your life and your business, though for most purposes may run smoothly, the minute there is a problem, you have no redress. You alone know whether you want to settle in a country where the state systems regard you as an inferior with seriously curtailed rights.
This is a country where a restaurant in Lisbon sued a customer for writing criticism in the complaints book. That’s the way it is in Portugal.
There was a time when I thought this was changing. However, while the government protects certain sectors of the community from criticism we will continue to have a two-tiered society. This two-tiered system is then bound to spill over into the public sector and create a kind of pecking order, as evidenced by the instance quoted above.
I make no bones about it. I regard this as a fundamental problem in Portugal, and this, if nothing else, puts the country out of bounds.
john
