Tomorrow, Monday 6 March, Judge João Pedro Caupers’ mandate at the Constitutional Court (TC) will end. A member of the TC since March 2014, co-opted by the ten judges elected by parliament, Caupers became vice president in July 2016. He became president in February 2021, a position he now holds.
Monday will complete his nine-year term (length of the TC judges’ single term) and it remains to be seen: will he resign or extend his presence until he is replaced (the DN asked but still got no response)? Don’t forget: at the moment two other judges of the TC are in extended term: the vice president Pedro Machete and Lino Ribeiro. The three – Caupers, Machete and Ribeiro – have one characteristic in common: they are not elected by parliament; rather, they were chosen by their peers in court. In other words, his replacement cannot be resolved by Parliament (which elects the remaining ten judges). They will even have to choose the replacements. And there are no deadlines for that. Hence the question: can a TC judge get a life sentence?
For constitutionalist and university professor Jorge Bacelar Gouveia, this is exactly what is at stake: the possibility of a constitutional judge seeing his mandate extended indefinitely.
Outraged by this “situation of unacceptable degradation of the Constitutional Court”, in his opinion “without any parallel in the Portuguese republican and judicial institutions, shaped as they are by a virtuous principle of a temporary nature in the exercise of public office”, the professor wrote a letter to the President of the Parliament, Augusto Santos Silva (PS), suggesting exactly this scenario: “It is enough that the elected judges do nothing to replace the co-opted judges who are in line with their position their terms of office expired so they could remain in their positions indefinitely, in the end these positions even became lifetime positions!”.
Bacelar Gouveia also underlines the “unacceptable” situation characterized by the fact that judges elected by parliament are subject to preliminary hearings by deputies and co-opted judges are not. In other words: “There is a subliminal distinction between constitutional judges of the “first class” – the co-opted ones, about whom nothing is asked about their suitability for the position – and constitutional judges of the “2nd class” – those who ” hit” by an increasingly demanding and rigorous public parliamentary hearing.”
For example, in the letter, the university professor proposes legislative changes that solve the two problems: one that stipulates that the mandates “end automatically” when the mandate expires; and another providing for parliamentary hearings for all candidate judges.
Source: DN
