The Ombudsman, Maria Lúcia Amaral, said on Wednesday that she will accompany the preventive inspection process of the metadata bill requested by the President of the Republic to the Constitutional Court (TC), stressing that it is her duty.
The first time he has publicly addressed the issue since last April, Ratton Palace judges declared some rules of the so-called “metadata law” unconstitutional, after a complaint he filed in 2019. The Ombudsman avoided commenting directly on the bill presented last week by the Government elude the advantage of the TC, justifying it with the lack of time to analyze the diploma.
“I haven’t had time to see the proposal yet, so I don’t know and I’m not going to comment on something that I haven’t had time to study at all,” Maria Lúcia Amaral told reporters after being questioned. on the sidelines of the meeting “Another Spanking No — For the elimination of corporal punishment”, promoted by the Instituto de Apoio à Criança, at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon.
The Ombudsman, who was also a judge of the TC, also explained that the use of metadata for criminal investigation purposes without compromising the informative self-determination of citizens and the reservation of privacy is a complex issue.
“This is such a complex issue, technically and legally, with so many consequences and so serious that I do not pronounce myself in this way without having studied the issue well,” he reiterated.
However, when it came to carefully following the request for preventive inspection by the TC judges already announced by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in May, Maria Lúcia Amaral was emphatic: “Of course, it is my duty.”
The government’s bill to regulate access to metadata of electronic communications waives the creation of a specific database for criminal investigationin which the information of all users was kept for one year, in order to use the databases already maintained by telecommunications operators for the exercise of their commercial activity.
According to the Minister of Justice, Catarina Sarmento e Castro, the use of these databases for criminal investigation will be done so that serious crimes can be combated, such as terrorism, human trafficking or drug trafficking.
The Constitutional Court (TC), in a ruling dated April 19, declared unconstitutional the rules of the so-called metadata law that determine that telephone and internet service providers must keep data related to communications with customers —including origin, destination , date and time, equipment type and location — for a period of one year, for eventual use in criminal investigation.
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The government bill delivered last week to the Assembly of the Republic establishes, for criminal investigation purposes, access to the “date of call, associated date/time group, service and number called,” among other elements.
Telecom operators are also expected to provide the following metadata: “Subscriber ID or number, station address and type, user codes, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) and International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI); telephone number, IP protocol address used to establish communication, port of origin of the communication, as well as the data associated with the start and end of Internet access“.
The new law will grant “the judicial authorities the competence to request metadata from the company that offers electronic communications networks and/or services”, “when there are reasons that support the indispensability of the information for the discovery of the truth or the impossibility or difficulty in obtaining evidence to the contrary.
The Government’s proposal caused concern for the Judicial Police and the Public Ministry, which They question the effects of the TC ruling on criminal investigations.
Source: Observadora
