The parliament approved this Wednesday the creation of a working group within the framework of the Constitutional Affairs Commission to “advance quickly” on a legislative solution to regulate access to metadata for judicial purposes.
The PAN request initially provided that the constitution of the working group would focus on “the evaluation of the Constitutional Court ruling” that pointed out several unconstitutionalities to the current law that regulates access to metadata.
However, after the Government’s bill and the bills of the PSD, Chega and PCP on this subject were reduced to discussion in the specialty, without a vote, PS and PSD proposed this Wednesday at the meeting of the Commission of Constitutional Issues that the scope of work The group would focus on the articulation of the different diplomas.
15 Answers to Understand Decision Bomb Effects on Metadata
“The fundamental thing will be the constitution of a working group to evaluate the legislative initiatives and operationalize these initiatives, and not to analyze the consequences of the sentence,” defended the deputy of the socialist caucus Pedro Delgado Alves, who had already suggested this solution in debate in plenary on Friday.
The vice president of the social democratic caucus André Coelho Lima also defended that it makes sense to create a working group to “merge the projects already discussed in plenary and move as soon as possible towards a legislative solution”.
Given these positions, the spokeswoman and sole deputy of the PAN, Inês Sousa Real, verbally agreed to change the scope of the request so that the work table would follow the course proposed by the two largest benches, thus gathering the consensus of all parties present. .
The president of the 1st Commission, Fernando Negrão, asked the different benches to name the deputies who will be part of that working group during the day so that “it gets down to work quickly” and reported that the presidency will fall to the PSD.
The socialist deputy Pedro Delgado Alves had expressed this Friday the wish that the work of the specialty be completed in time for the last voting session, scheduled for July 20.
In the specialty, the deputies will have to try to find a common solution from two different paths: while PSD, PCP and Chega sought to respond to the declaration of unconstitutionality of the Constitutional Court (TC) by modifying the 2008 metadata conservation law, the Government chose to make a new law, which regulates access to metadata regarding Electronic Communications for criminal investigation purposes.
In Friday’s debate, the Minister of Justice, Catarina Sarmento e Castro, defended the government’s solution as “a safe path”but was available for “a broad consensus.”
Metadata. The Government’s proposal is a “safe path”, but there is an opening for “broad consensus”
On the same occasion, the parliamentary leader of the PSD, Paulo Mota Pinto, the first party to propose a diploma on the subject, said he was willing to accept the executive’s approach in the specialty, “complementing” it with a mitigated and selective conservation of the regime. metadata, which the Social Democrats will propose in a text to replace their initial diploma.
In an April 19 ruling, the Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional the rules of the metadata law that determine that telephone and internet service providers must keep data related to customer communications —including origin, destination, date and time, equipment type, and location—for an extended period of time. period of one year, for eventual use in the criminal investigation.
The metadata law debate took two years to start
Meanwhile, the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has already announced that he will ask the Constitutional Court to carry out a preventive inspection of the new law that may be approved by Parliament.
Source: Observadora
