The great evil of Portugal is justice
A few years ago, the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry asked for a study on the main reasons for limiting the growth of our economy from the perspective of entrepreneurs.
It was with some surprise that they were received as responses, mainly because topics such as labor legislation and the bureaucratization of the system were very much at the bottom of the list, and the topic of justice appeared at the head. Interestingly, businessmen did not complain about the decisions of the judges, in whom they trusted, but about the mechanisms of justice.
As a result of this research, the CCIP prepared, with the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, a work on “Economic Justice”, which it delivered to various governments, but without a solution to this inhibition, as if our leaders are unattractive or unattractive. present in solving it.
After all these years, reaching this Christmas period, in which we review our life and prepare for the coming year, I thought about what would be the greatest wish for this Portugal of 2022.
And I found myself grappling with the subject of justice again. And not only economic justice, but all the justice that is not practiced and deviated from practice in Portugal.
How can we have so many cases of corruption, in which those who participate in them are not penalized, so many cases of economic crimes, in which those responsible continue to live without having been judged for their actions, so many other more common crimes in which justice is immersed in formulas of delay and negligence and in which the example is never given that it is not worth transgressing.
Justice is conditioned by a process that, intending to give guarantees to the most unprotected, ends up favoring all those who, having violated, use the protection system to postpone and try to prescribe as decisions that would condemn them.
It is conditioned by a lengthy and complex decision-making process that only guarantees that justice is always late – and we all know that late justice is always an injustice, which discredits the system and the rule of law.
Thus, because we do not believe in justice to ensure correct behavior, proceeding with prior controls, in order to guarantee the annulment of the hypothesis of being committed or malfeasance.
That is why we demand public office holders to publish all of their assets, we do not allow the use of cash values, we prohibit transfers without their reason being very well justified and many other actions that violate people by withdrawing their freedom to which you should be entitled, just because the judicial system, which should be the guarantee of all these situations, does not work and nobody wants to act at the source of the problem.
The normal would be to rely on a judge to know the assets of the public office holder to ensure that there is no undue enrichment, or to rely on a judge to assess whether a given transaction is correct or criminal.
It is neither society nor those who should carry out this type of policing – and what, of course, ends up happening is that information made public is used to defame, which ends up scaring away many of those who can contribute to the development of the country’s life, not because they have something to hide, but simply because they don’t feel good about the intrusion on their privacy.
On the other hand, a human imagination, which is extraordinarily creative, will provide new ways of doing wrong – such as the creation of cryptocurrencies, a transfer of heritage to other family members, etc. – making the application of justice even more difficult.
A problem can only be solved by attacking the source of the problem itself and we didn’t want to do that yet. The solutions that mitigate the problem always end up creating bigger problems and today we have more corruption, more undue enrichment and less quality in our public leaders.
Let’s do something nice for ourselves. Let us deal with justice.
