Timorese prime minister Xanana Gusmão today announced the opening of a new recruitment process for the National Police of East-Timor, following a recommendation by a review commission comprising members from Portugal and Australia.
“We will carefully analyse the entire recruitment process, which generated a great deal of contestation. For this reason, the previous process will be archived and a new one will be opened,” the prime minister said, speaking to journalists after his weekly meeting with Timorese president José Ramos-Horta at the presidency in Dili.
“The interior minister will explain the new recruitment process in detail. Those who do not pass the first phase will be automatically excluded, with the aim of guaranteeing transparency and fairness,” Gusmão said. The decision was taken on Wednesday during the Council of Ministers meeting, at which recommendations from the commission — which includes members of Portugal’s Republican National Guard and the Australian Federal Police — were analysed.
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The Timorese government had already temporarily suspended the recruitment competition on February 11, after candidates and several civil society organisations denounced a lack of credibility in the process due to alleged favouritism. Young Timorese began demonstrations at the start of this week demanding the cancellation of the competition.
Last week, the chair of the PNTL recruitment supervision commission, Paulo Assis Belo, said the team had detected 71 children of police officers and 72 children of veterans placed in privileged positions on the list of vacancies. In January, the police recruitment commission had announced that 10,595 candidates had passed, but only 400 were authorised to proceed to medical testing — without ever explaining how those 400 were selected.
