Live blog?
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Is it postponed till Jan and Feb ?
January and February are spoken of in the context of the upcoming Presidential election.
Live now
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They’ve found several clauses unconstitutional but they are reading out the articles so they need to be cross referenced. It’s not clear what these specific clauses say based on the live broadcast. Probably the newspapers will do a better rundown in a bit.
EDIT: They are going through it now and they are saying that the retroactivity is a breach. So… seems like grandfathering may be on the table. You can watch the livestream at the link posted prior.
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so we are back to square one until Jan/Feb, in which parliament could ram it through on a 2/3 majority?
They would need to address the clauses that are considered unconstitutional. It would not be alright to push it through after the TC has said these clauses violate constitutionality.
The TC has found almost all the new changes unconstitutional. More specifically the differences created by the proposed law in terms of:
- retro-activity and violation of legitimate expectations
- different treatment of naturalized vs born Portuguese (with regards to loss of nationality)
- the general loss of nationality seems to have some concerns too
I couldn’t catch if they also referenced the CPLP 7 years thing vs 10 for others. Might have missed it, did anyone else catch that?
They seem to have a serious issue with treating different people differently.
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so they would need to amend it, if they do, and then it passes parliament, is it automatically sent to courts for review? Or does the president or another party have to send it again ?
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My understanding is that the court striking this down means that parliament can’t pass this law without altering the constitution first
I could be wrong, but would love to be corrected
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If retroactive is a breach (yay) then even if its punted to later, I would imagine anyone trying to make changes would have to consider it seriously. Of course they can always overrule the court with a supermajority.
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i wonder if IL is lobby-able on this issue. it’s one thing to caucus with Chega on a law, it’s another to team up with them to overrule the constitutional court. of the 3 main groups who voted for this, they seem least culture-war-y to my untrained eye.
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I believed this from the start that this bill had a 50% chance ofbeing political theatre, but now I’m beginning to think it is 90% chance this whole nationality law by parliament was just showman ship. On what planet do a bunch of law makers (that are more than likely lawyers themselves) think this bill would have been even remotely constitutional? They cant be this dumb surely?
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My read on them is they started strong with liberal values but have fallen into the Chega orbit, optimistically (on my part) as a reaction to Zé do Algarve, where the electorate is very Chega aligned
Maybe lobbyable, sure, but I am not optimistic mostly due to the fact that we don’t have voting rights (yet) and I don’t know they can afford to play the long game
You’d be surprised what people can convince themselves of
Does anyone know what they said, if anything, about counting from application date/residency card?
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Let’s wait until we have all the information.
It’s beyond my Portuguese language ability to understand it all, but here’s a recording of the announcement.
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To be honest.. I’m not sure everyone is so competent. Right after the reading from the TC, RTP1 went to this other guy who is a “Constitutionalist” and he kept going on about how he doesn’t understand how there are two levels of PT citizens created if someone who is naturalized can lose nationality if they are found guilty of a serious crime.
It seems like equal treatment 101 under most constitutions that I’m aware of.. so I was pretty shocked that he went on for about 10 minutes that “someone born Portuguese is a Portuguese person by origin” and “someone who is naturalized just isn’t” so how can the TC find the different treatment of these two people unconstitutional..
It seemed like even the definition of citizenship is different in his mind from what I know. But I’m not a lawyer or a constitutionalist. Just a layperson who wants people to be treated fairly and equally.
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According to this article, starting the clock at card issuance instead of application is specifically unconstitutional
The rules declared unconstitutional by unanimous decision concern the automatic impediment to access to citizenship for those convicted of a crime with a sentence equal to or greater than two years in prison, the consolidation of nationality not affecting situations of “manifest fraud” - as it is not possible to define the concept -, and the rule concerning applications that depend on the date of the residence permit and not on the date of the application, violating the principle of legitimate expectation.
Notably, I don’t see in this article anything about the retroactivity for e.g. GV investors
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The lawyers in the WhatsApp group are currently advising that they didn’t hear anything about transitional periods or grandfathering mentioned, so we need to wait to see the long form written ruling to know if it’s 5 years from application or not.
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