The Foreigners and Borders Service at Faro Airport has nabbed a 50-year-old Portuguese citizen who is wanted in France for attempted murder.
The prime suspect for the attack in the Lille area of France, was named on a European Arrest Warrant issued by the French authorities.
The detainee, who had intended to travel to Cork in the Irish Republic, was whisked off to the Court of Appeal of Évora for validation of the arrest warrant.
The Portuguese suspect was send directly to prison to await his extradition to France to face charges.
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Capital punishment in France (s banned by Article 66-1 of the Constitution of the French Republic, voted as a constitutional amendment by the Congress of the French Parliament on 19 February 2007 and simply stating "No one can be sentenced to the death penalty" (French: Nul ne peut être condamné à la peine de mort).
The death penalty was already declared illegal on 9 October 1981 when President François Mitterrand signed a law prohibiting the judicial system from using it and commuting the sentences of the six people on death row to life imprisonment. The last execution took place by guillotine, being the main legal method since the French Revolution; Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian citizen convicted of torture and murder on French soil, who was put to death in September 1977 in Marseille.
Portugal was a pioneer in the process of abolition of capital punishment. No executions have been carried out since 1846, with the formal abolishment of capital punishment for civil crimes occurring in 1867.
The method of capital punishment used in Portugal was by hanging. Portugal was the first country in the world to begin the process to abolish the death penalty, abolishing it in stages – for political crimes in 1852, for all crimes except the military in 1867, and for all crimes in 1911. In 1916 Portugal entered in World War I and it was re-established only for military crimes in war time with a foreign country and only in the theater of war. With the new Constitution in 1976, it was again abolished for all crimes.
The last execution in Portugal took place in Lagos in 1846. The execution of a soldier of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps carried out in France during World War I was poorly documented until recently; soldier João Augusto Ferreira de Almeida, executed by firing squad on 16 September 1917, was issued a "moral rehabilitation" by the Council of Ministers and the President of the Republic (as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces) in 2017 (100th anniversary of his execution and 150th anniversary of the end of capital punishment for civil crimes in Portugal) — the action was purely symbolic, and not a reappreciation of the facts of the case, an exoneration, or a pardon; merely the "rehabilitation of the memory of a soldier convicted to a sentence contrary to human rights and the values and principles that have been long ingrained in Portuguese society.”
In the 2008 European Values Study (EVS), 51.6% of respondents in Portugal said the death penalty can never be justified, while only 1.5% said it can be always justified.
