In the order, to which the Lusa agency had access, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco requested, on the other hand, the secretary-general of the Assembly of the Republic “to take steps to obtain the images collected by Canal Parliament during the said plenary session and to send them to the Parliamentary Transparency Commission”.
The President of the Assembly of the Republic considers that “the facts reported may constitute a violation of the fundamental duties of deputies” enshrined in the respective Statutes and Code of Conduct.
“Under the terms of the Statute of Deputies, deputies have the duty to respect the dignity of the Assembly of the Republic and other deputies. The Code of Conduct reinforces this obligation, determining that Deputies must perform their duties with respect for other deputies, intervene in parliamentary work with civility and institutional loyalty and refrain from behavior that may not bring prestige to the parliamentary institution”says Aguiar-Branco.
According to the President of the Assembly of the Republic Gestures like the one Mariana Mortágua made “are likely to be interpreted as offensive, degrading or attacking the decorum and dignity of the Assembly of the Republic”so “the factuality described may be susceptible to censure in light of the principles that govern the exercise of the parliamentary mandate”.
“A gesture such as the one allegedly practiced, by directly affecting a deputy in the exercise of his mandate, goes beyond the scope of political disagreement or freedom of expression, not contributing to political debate or public enlightenment, but rather attacking institutional trust, the individual dignity of the targeted deputy and the collective prestige of the Assembly of the Republic”, he adds.
In this order, Aguiar-Branco points out that Mariana Mortágua “has already announced that she will cease her duties as a deputy, a circumstance that, in practice, could make the continuation of the investigation useless”.
In his opinion, “however, this fact does not diminish the legal and institutional obligation of the President of the Assembly of the Republic to determine the referral of the complaint to the competent body”.
“The referral remains necessary to ensure the objective investigation of the facts, preserve the dignity and decorum of the Assembly of the Republic and guarantee the integrity of the institutional record of parliamentary conduct, thus complying with the principles of accountability, transparency and safeguarding the institution’s prestige, regardless of the future termination of the mandate by the targeted deputy”, he argues.