I think Article 15 is offering protection to those legally resident in PT and to refugees (via the reference to “stateless persons”). It may well also allow protection to citizens of other EU member states. ARI candidates are not members of any of those groups.
Referring to Mark’ post. What I wrote is not my analysis, but after reading the constitution and then researching the cases to date, looking at the news articles so far and then getting a number of constitutionalists legal opinions sent to me. If you want to take the doom, give up on your rights and not fight, the good for you…go enjoy Greece.
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The article in Negócios opens as below.
“ Pareceres jurídicos de Jorge Miranda, Sérvulo Correia e Rui Medeiros concluem que o fim do regime dos vistos gold, com a proibição de serem ainda considerados os pedidos entrados após 16 de fevereiro, viola o princípio da proteção da confiança.”
This states that the attempt to pass a retroactive invalidation, viz. by nullifying any applications made after 16 Feb., is unconstitutional. This is true. But it is not relevant to ARI candidates who applied before that date, for whom the concern is whether renewal conditions will change in the future.
There might possibly be room to argue that the word “com” (“with”) means that the Constitutional lawyers have said that the closure of the programme as a whole is unconstitutional but that is a lot of weight to put on a single word which is that of a journalist rather than a lawyer.
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What I want is to understand the position. I am completely open to being proved wrong and I hope you can do it.
ARI investors are legal residents of Portugal; each is issued a “Título de Residência” card. They may choose not to be tax residents of Portugal, or to establish their “center of vital affairs” in Portugal.
Are you the President of the Republic, or the head of Portugal’s Constitutional Court? Why is it the obligation of this community to disprove your FUD?
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ARI investors who are now legally resident in PT are in a different position and may well benefit from Constitutional protections. I am an ARI applicant however and it’s from that perspective that I am asking questions.
I would encourage anyone who thinks I am engaging in FUD to cease reading and responding to my posts, especially where such responses include accusations of trolling.
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You continue to make baseless allegations attacking the validity of the ARI program and the legal standing of its participants.
To clarify for folks in the audience, it’s well and good for someone to arrive and ask, “Do we have a solid legal argument to maintain our status?” It’s not fine for an anonymous new arrival to show up and emit a torrent of messages whose theme amounts to, “The constitution grants no rights to ARI participants! You’re all doomed! Prove me wrong!”
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ALso wiggles, what I wrote was based on full opinions of the entire ARI scheme start (investment) to finish (permanent residence and application for citizenship). Now, if you want a golden guarantee that the Constitutional Court or other courts have ruled and we are all protected throughout the term of the relationship we signed up for with Portugal during the ARI scheme, then I ask you: 1) why would the PM have put this forward and 2) why are so many Portuguese people involved and 3) why are we wasting time and money getting legal opinions to ensure our own positions are shored up. This is a legal issue in which you have to apply the appropriate Arcticles/Acts/Laws/Settled Precepts to reach a conclusion on a new issue.
Hence the numerous legal opinions I have seen and cannot publish because they are not my IP, but are from the top legal minds, some who drafted the constitution in 1975.
If you want to take the opposite approach in defeating the goal of preparing this forum and ourselves for the best fight, before any proposed laws have been sent to Assembly of the Republic for a month long process and then to the President of the Republic, who is an esteemed Constitutional Scholar and whose constitutional obligation is to protect the Republic of Portugal, then you have achieved your goal in posting.
We asked and got the answers on Sunday and Monday, sorry you are late to the party.
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Hi guys, I know the stakes are high here, but let’s try to keep our cool and remember that we’re all on the same side here. At least we should be.
Being on the same side doesn’t mean we can’t disagree on certain things, but please do so respectfully.
I’ve restored Mark’s posts that had been hidden, and I’ve removed some of the more recent posts discussing whether they should be hidden or not to clean up the thread. I might go through the previous posts in this thread and remove or tweak certain statements that are perhaps unnecessarily combative in an effort to keep the overall temperature down.
Going forward, please continue using the Flag button if you think something requires staff attention—be it personal attacks, potential hidden agendas, etc. Probably better to select the “Something Else” option so you can leave a note about what exactly you think is problematic about the post:
We’ll do our best to deal with it and investigate where needed. But remember that we’re people too, and we might get certain things wrong the first time around. If you think we do, please send me a direct message.
I’ll institute a (perhaps temporary) rule that to participate in any hotly debated topic such as this one, you’re not allowed to use a VPN or a temporary/anonymous email address (e.g. Apple’s Hide My Email feature, or similar) when accessing the forum. Particularly if you’re not a long-time active contributor to the community.
It’s of course still possible to be anonymous in public, but to engage in these kinds of discussions you are not allowed to hide your identity from admins (i.e. me). That’ll help me be able to verify whether people have hidden agendas, etc. That way we won’t need to speculate about people’s intentions in public either.
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