The president of the Constitutional Court argued today that the Constitution will only be “truly fulfilled” when the “freer, fairer and more fraternal Portugal” of its preamble is achieved, warning of “threats to freedom and dignity” in society.
Speaking at the opening session of the conference ‘Justice before and after April 25’, which is being held today at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, José João Abrantes recalled the constitutional evolution of the Republic, underlining the role of this court as a guarantor of the “Constitution, the fundamental rights of citizens and the democratic rule of law”, being a “backbone” of the democratic regime that emerged from the revolution of April 25, 1974.
The Constitutional Court (TC), as “guardian of the Constitution” of 1976, “has as its mission and reason for being to defend a Fundamental Law centered on the dignity of the human person, the first and most indispensable of the values of the democratic rule of law”, defends its president.
“This human person is not an abstraction, they are human beings, concrete women and men, inserted in a society where there are tensions and contradictions, where there are many potential threats to the freedom and dignity of these concrete people,” said Judge Councillor José João Abrantes.
The president of the TC argued that the Constitution “will only be truly fulfilled when we fully achieve the ‘freer, fairer and more fraternal’ Portugal spoken of in its preamble”.
The president of the Court of Auditors, José Tavares, also traced the evolution of the institution with more than 600 years of existence, stressing that it was only the 1976 Constitution, which came out of the revolution, that gave this higher court a constitutional framework “in a more developed and complete way than previous Constitutions”, with subsequent organic and operational changes.
“One thing is certain: the Court of Auditors of 2024 is substantially different from the Court of Auditors of 50 years ago, it has known how to evolve and I believe we can say that a modern Court of Auditors has been built step by step, naturally, always subject to continuous improvement,” said José Tavares, who also pointed out the institution’s concern with emerging issues such as demographics, information technologies, the environment and climate change, the sustainability of social security, health, education, compliance with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, among others.
