Portugal's Council of Ministers today approved a bill to establish a register of those convicted of paedophile offences. This now will go to parliament for approval but the long-awaited clause that allows parents easy access to the list is not present.
According to Secretary of State for Justice, Antonio Moura Costa, it is proposed that parents can ask their local police, "on the basis of concrete situations," whether a person is on the list to which the police will have online access, as will the courts, the probation services and child protection services.
In a press conference at the end of the Council of Ministers meeting today, the Minister of the Presidency, Luis Marques Guedes, stressed that paedophile registration will be of limited duration, between five and twenty years, depending on the length of the prison sentence served, and he called for "real national debate" on the issue.
According to the statement from the Council of Ministers, there will be "two measures for the protection of children and the prevention of risks of sex offences against them" in the bill approved today.
One is the list and the second is the "inhibition of a convicted person's exercise of professional or voluntary activities involving direct and regular contact with children."
This means that the model to be adopted stops parents being able directly to access the register, something that the Justice Minister had proposed. Parent will have access to the paedophile list only through the local police or courts, only if they have verifiable suspicions and only if the suspected person lives in the area.
If it is confirmed that an sex offender does live in the area the police will “have to take measures to guarantee the safety of children” and the parents must keep the name and address of the offender to themselves.
The initial proposal from Justice Minister, Paula Teixeira da Cruz, was for the parents or guardians of children under 16 to be able directy to access a list of name and address of convicted paedophiles living in their area, or in the area where their children went to school.
These proposed changes announced today should lead to some lively debate in parliament as parent groups wanted direct access to data, the counter argument is that there needs to be good reason before names are released to parents.
Isabel Cruz, general secretary of the National Commission for Data Protection has not yet been consulted on the system whereby people can access the pedophile database and many involved organisations agree the government's proposal may not be constitutional.
The constitutionalist Jorge Bacelar Gouveia says that the proposal is indeeed unconstitutional, "it suffers from a serious problem of unconstitutionality, since paedophiles who have served time already have paid for the offence they committed and therefore cannot be victims of a lifetime of persecution, this is a register that will undermine their rehabilitation."
The President of the Trade Union Association of Judges said that the Government's proposal still has to be passed by the Constitutional Court. José Mouraz Lopes says that Portuguese law does not allow unlimited access to personal data.
Lopes added that the proposed system in other countries has had poor results, such as in the United Kingdom, France and the United States.
Jorge Ascensão from the National Confederation of Parents' Associations believes that setting up the database "can have a positive effect to prevent people committing these crimes,” adding that it needs to be run securely to ensure the necessary social stability."
The executive president of the Institute for Child Support supports the idea. Dulce Rocha said the fact that there is not open access means that people after revenge or persecution will not be allowed access, only those who are suspicious of a situation involving children will have controlled access in order to protect their child.
