Portugal approves the legislative framework for the CPLP mobility agreement by the summer
“It is a priority in our government program and I hope even before the summer to obtain the approval of this legislative framework”, said António Costa, at the final press conference, together with his Cape Verdean counterpart, Ulisse Correia e Silva, from the VI Summit between Cape Verde and Portugal, which took place today in the city of Praia.
“The Assembly of the Republic was dissolved at the end of last year, it will enter into full force now in the month of April. We will have to compete with the Government Program, the State Budget for 2022, but the Government’s first legislative initiatives will be precisely as changes to the first operational.
The prime minister explained that “all the Member States of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP) have already ratified this agreement, signed on July 17, 2021, at the summit of Heads of State and Government, in Luanda, which passes its entry into force.
“The number of ratifications deposited at the CPLP headquarters has already been concluded, starting in January in January. And each country has to make changes to the legislation now for the agreement to be applicable”, said the Portuguese prime minister.
Brazil today has the instruments of ratification of the Mobility Agreement, which have already been ratified by Cape Verde, Mozambique, Portugal, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe.
The agreement will be allowed to legislate, together with the UN Secretariat, and it will be up to each country to legislate specifically on how the countries will allow the movement of people between the signatories.
This understanding at the level of the CPLP establishes a “cooperation framework” between all Member States in a “flexible and variable” way and, in practice, covers any citizen.
The agreement defines that CPLP mobility covers holders of diplomatic, official, special and service passports and ordinary passports.
The issue of circulation facilitation has been debated in the CPLP for about two decades, but it had a greater impetus with a more concrete one presented by Portugal at the Brasilia summit, in 2016, and became the priority of Brasilia’s rotating proposal. Cape Verde, from 2018 to 2021.
Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe and Timor-Leste are the nine Member States of the CPLP.
PVJ // JH