In response to questions from the Lusa news agency about the fact that the Commission for Equality and Against Racial Discrimination (CICDR) has been at a standstill for almost a year, Teresa Pizarro Beleza pointed out that “all this delay and inoperability seems to show very little commitment on the part of the sovereign bodies in the institutional fight against racism and xenophobia”.
The CICDR was set up as an autonomous body, operating under the auspices of the country’s parliament, in 2023, but the president was only chosen on 19 June 2024 and is scheduled to take office today, which means that the body has been out of action for almost a year.
For the leader of the Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia (ORX), this is a delay that doesn’t go hand in hand with the assessment of the problem by the previous Socialist government, which, in the National Plan to Combat Racism and Discrimination 2021-25 “expressly recognised, in the voice of some of its members, the existence of structural racism in Portugal and the need to combat it”.
Teresa Pizarro Beleza recalled that “in its previous existence” – before it became autonomous, the CICDR was part of the High Commission for Migration – this body already suffered from “reduced effectiveness” in terms of responding to and sanctioning facts that were the subject of complaints.
In her opinion, this can be explained by “little or no confidence on the part of potential victims, who are either unaware of its existence or don’t believe that it is relevant or worthwhile to lodge a complaint”.
This is despite the “high levels of perceived discrimination on the part of the general public living in Portugal, particularly people who self-identify as black, gypsy or of mixed ethnicity”.
And also despite “insistent complaints” from the Council of Europe’s European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) about the need for greater official dedication and effectiveness in combating police violence against racialised groups”, as well as better control over the discrimination “that persists” against residents of African or gypsy origin.
In addition to the delay in the functioning of the CICDR, the ORX leader believes that “the problem of the deficient criminalisation” of phenomena with a discriminatory or racist dimension is still open and points out that “the current criminal legislation on the matter [is] considered by many to be insufficient in its prediction and application”.
In her opinion, and taking into account the “insistence of the Constitution of the Republic on the dimension of equality and non-discrimination (…), perhaps ordinary (infra-constitutional) criminal law should give more serious consideration to liability for racist or xenophobic acts, beyond what is provided for in Article 240, which incriminates acts that constitute “discrimination and incitement to hatred and violence”.
“And the legislative, executive and judicial powers should pay greater attention to the need to rethink policies and laws that can counteract the legacy of years of colonialism and legally sanctioned racism that has inevitably contaminated contemporary interracial living in our country, which only a non-historical and distracted perspective can characterise as free of racism and xenophobia,” she argues.
The former director of the Faculty of Law at Universidade Nova de Lisboa points out that the current government “has shown concern about the issue of illegal immigration, which it sees as uncontrolled, focusing its attention on policing, the effort to update the thousands of pending regularisation processes and the attempt to control potential immigrants in the territory of their countries of origin beforehand’.
She also points out that, with the CICDR not functioning properly, “it is also the fulfilment of the obligations that the Portuguese state assumed by signing and ratifying the relevant international treaties that is at stake”.
*With Lusa
