Portuguese lawyer Jorge Menezes told Lusa that, “from the point of view of the principles and values that Portugal and China are bound to mutually respect”, the Chinese administrative region of Macau “is no longer a success story”.
“If the Portuguese authorities say that Macau is, from that point of view, a success story, either they don’t know, or they aren’t telling the truth”, added Jorge Menezes, who has worked in Macau since 1997, having interrupted his activity in the territory in 2000, where he returned in 2008.
Jorge Menezes defends that the Portuguese authorities, who receive in Lisbon, between the 18th and 22nd of this month, the president of the executive of the Macau Special Administrative Region (RAEM), Ho Iat Seng, should take advantage of the occasion to express their criticism of the violation of human rights in the territory, which constitutes the disrespect, by the Chinese side, of the Sino-Portuguese Declaration, signed on April 13, 1987, which resulted in the transfer of sovereignty to Macau on December 20, 1999.
Deposited at the United Nations, the Joint Declaration is considered an international treaty.
“If Portugal criticizes the Government of China and, therefore, indirectly the Government of Macau for violating fundamental rights, it is not interfering in a foreign country. It is complying, demanding compliance with an international agreement to which Portugal is a party, deposited in the United Nations”, he defended.
For Jorge Menezes, what is at stake is the violation by China of the commitment, assumed with Portugal, that it would respect fundamental freedoms as they existed before, during the Portuguese administration.
“It’s called the principle of continuity of the legal system,” he explained.
Jorge Menezes criticizes, in particular, the situation in the sectors of justice and social communication, which he considers emblematic of the “suppression of fundamental rights, the degradation of civic life”.
In the justice sector, he recognizes that “there are still many prominent Portuguese lawyers”, which translates into a judicial practice still in Portuguese, but he questions that despite the system being bilingual [procedural acts and judgments are made in Portuguese and Chinese ] “Many courts, especially the lower courts, do not translate sentences. Some are too long and don’t translate. We ask and they don’t translate”.
“What results from the law, from the spirit of the law, at least is that they should translate when there are Portuguese lawyers involved. The same could also happen, on the contrary, if there are only Portuguese lawyers, in a case in Portuguese and there is only one Chinese lawyer, you could also have the same problem. The Chinese language is starting to dominate more and more and the Portuguese language is starting to lose relevance in the courts of Macau”, he explained.
As for the media sector, Jorge Menezes points out the responsibility for the fact that during the Portuguese administration Macau never had a culture of freedom of the press.
“The last governor of Macau, General Rocha Vieira, did the country a disservice, insofar as he did not try to inculcate in Macau a culture of freedom of the press, protection of fundamental rights, political transparency, political accountability, an attempt to of democratization, as much as possible”, he accused.
In summary, he pointed out that “what is happening in Macau has been a slow degradation of fundamental freedoms and the rule of law”.
Regarding the ‘one country, two systems’ concept, created by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping – a “social experience”, as Jorge Menezes defines it -, the Portuguese lawyer maintains that in Macau and Hong Kong “democracy does not exist, but there is protection of fundamental rights and the rule of law”.
“We no longer had democracy and, therefore, what happened in Macau and Hong Kong was a kind of social experiment created by Deng Xiaoping to “try to have protection of fundamental rights and the rule of law without democracy”.
“This is not the case in Portugal and other countries around the world: it is democracy that supports the protection of fundamental rights and the rule of law, which has to do with compliance with rules, non-retroactivity of the law, general and abstract laws, equality,” he added.
Jorge Menezes considers that “unfortunately in Macau and Hong Kong, as demonstrated, the experience did not work”.
In fundamental rights, for example, the right to demonstrate, “a very important right in Macau, precisely because there is no democracy – and as the population cannot vote to choose who governs them, who decides their lives -, the right to protest, demonstration, it is much more relevant than in Portugal or in a democratic country, where it is also important. But in Macau it was a fundamental right and this right was practically destroyed by police practice and by the jurisprudence of the courts”.
“Second: freedom of the press. Freedom of the press, an increasingly fundamental issue in a free society, even more so in a society that is not democratic, where people will not be able to react by voting”, he highlighted.
Jorge Menezes argues that the overwhelming majority of the Macau press “is either directly controlled by the political power of Macau or China, or actively censors itself”.
“The press has also been under increasing pressure. Nowadays we all know that there are things that cannot be written, that there are people who cannot speak to the newspapers and, therefore, there is a decrease in the transparency of public life in a frightening and very worrying way, ”he added.
“Other fundamental rights have been violated. They keep growing, everything starts with the approval of the new version of the national security law, modeled in some way, although different from the one implemented in Hong Kong”, he compared.
According to Jorge Menezes, the new version of the national security law criminalizes opinion.
“It starts to criminalize opinion. The purpose of the law is political control of the population, of civil society. There are behaviors that become crimes, which have nothing to do with national security”, he accused.
The new version foresees special courts, where Portuguese judges are not allowed, he warned.
“It’s the turning off of Macao’s light as a free society,” he concluded.
Distinguished in 2018 as “Personality of the Year” by the Macau Daily Times newspaper, Jorge Menezes was considered one of the “20 Most Influential People in Macau”, in its 20 years of history, by Macau Business, which presents him as “a kind of door -voice of pro-democracy ideas’ in the Macao SAR.
