I read two articles on Politico.EU on the subject. Yet, I have a few questions. First, was there a request made to share data? Second, if there was a request made - what is the legal procedure to share data? Third, if there was no request made - why did the Portugal proactively share data?
There was no request (afaik) done by any of the involved parties.
By law, if you’re planning a rally/event/etc you have to make a request to your local mayorship, who then approves it (or not) while informing the police about it, so that security details can be planned.
Since the rallies in question involved displays related to certain countries or were held in front of embassies (like the one supporting Navalny, which brought this case to the limelight), the embassies were also informed about who the organisers were.
As some one on the comments already mentioned, it seems to be a case of Hanlon’s Razor albeit a very unfortunate (and disturbing) one
Fine. But Correia's "protest was held on the Largo de Camões, which is nowhere near the Chinese embassy," so that doesn't apply.
> related to certain countries
Sorry, this doesn't follow. If I show up for a Tiananmen massacre vigil in New York, Gracie Mansion doesn't and doesn't need to notify the Chinese embassy.
I did add an OR in the sentence you quote; exactly because of the example you shared and another on in support of the Palestinian cause held in front of a concert hall just before a Brazilian singer concert, that would go on tour to Israel after.
As for your second point, I totally agree with your point. My previous comment isn’t supposed to show any agreement with the episodes, but just a factual showing of what happened, and how this has been general malpractice rather than some shady intelligence underground operation.
It's not conditional. The police and city hall can't say no. You're just suppose to inform them of the protest. Have done this a few times in Portugal.
All freedom comes with conditions, generally around not abusing them or otherwise interfering with other people's freedom.
Freedom in general or in reference to a particular type never means you can do whatever you want. The entire premise of civil society is that there are conditions on behavior. It is a fundamental principal that one person's freedom ends where another person's begins. Or as I've heard it said, "The freedom of your fist ends at the tip of my nose".
That's a nice sound bite that doesn't actually respond to what I said. It's the sort of thing a politician would say, and as with most such things it avoids difficult topics in favor of easy simplifications.
Because by implication, you're saying there should be no laws, since every law is a condition on freedom in some way. Is that your position on things?
As for dictators and the like: they adopt the words of civil society and spin it into propaganda. All you've pointed out it that bad people do bad things and lie about them, claiming they were good. You haven't addressed the problem of making sure my freedom isn't taken away when someone else acts on what they believe is their freedom.
So, do you think there should be any laws at all? If not, I'm not sure we can have a reasonable conversation here. If so, I'm happy to discuss further, as long as it's not in sound bites and cliches.
I was responding to your blanket statement-- that is what got us here. You're still avoiding the hard question about all laws being conditions on freedom.
As for public gatherings? Sure: they can interfere with my freedom to go about my life. They might prevent me from leaving my home. They might cause dangerous situations. A reasonable level of oversight helps to minimize that sort of thing. Lisbon went well beyond that, I think we would agree.
So: laws or no laws?
Edit: From my interpretation of your tone, I doubt we're actually very far apart on the issue. Permits for this sort of planned thing should be easy to get and extremely hard to turn down. Spontaneous demonstrations should be given very wide latitude to allow them even without prior approval, with local authority only intervening to make sure things stay safe. Demonstrators themselves should be held to a high level of accountability for their actions if things turn bad, but local authorities should be held to an extremely high standard of accountability if they interfere inappropriately.
But there are the difficult questions: keeping things safe, inappropriate interference... these are places where lines have to be drawn. They are gray areas. They take human judgement because one-size-fits-all policies don't actually fit all. This is a fundamental problem for civil society because people differ in their beliefs on where to draw the line. And people are fallible, they can make mistakes in judgement. People are also corruptible, or come with their own biases. It makes things difficult and messy, but that is the hard work that it takes to give people as much freedom as possible without sacrificing one person's freedom for someone else's. Even then there must be compromises: I think it's a very reasonable restriction on my freedom of movement to have to wait in traffic for a while because other people are exercising their freedom to assemble and protest etc.
My observation is that uou can tell the countries that embrace freedom from those that are tyrannies by whether or not they struggle with these questions vs. having one imposed on them without any recourse save revolution.
But it's still a matter of degree. England is much more free than China, but compared to the US its freedom of expression is much more limited by libel laws. While in the US, privacy-related freedom is much more limited compared to the EU with GDPR (even as flawed as that still is).
> But there are the difficult questions: keeping things safe, inappropriate interference... these are places where lines have to be drawn. They are gray areas. They take human judgement because one-size-fits-all policies don't actually fit all. This is a fundamental problem for civil society because people differ in their beliefs on where to draw the line. And people are fallible, they can make mistakes in judgement. People are also corruptible, or come with their own biases. It makes things difficult and messy, but that is the hard work that it takes to give people as much freedom as possible without sacrificing one person's freedom for someone else's. Even then there must be compromises: I think it's a very reasonable restriction on my freedom of movement to have to wait in traffic for a while because other people are exercising their freedom to assemble and protest etc.
We are different because things are very clear to me. Crystal clear. There are nothing "grey lines" there.
Keeping freedom of assembly behind so hoops to jump on a pretext "It's not me who is prohibiting this! Rules do! I'm doing it for your safety!" is very convenient for every bad government around. Otherwise it's entirely pointless.
1. Lots of angry people don't need any freedom of assembly to whack anybody good.
2. Everybody else will not do that anyway.
3. Whacking somebody good, is an act of assault, you either have a riot, civil war, or already a revolution.
You are ignoring my answer about how gatherings or protests can impact my own freedom. Any freedom has that potential. I listed some, but here are more:
What if I want to hold a gathering in the same place at the same time? Which gathering gets the space? Why should my freedom to assemble be limited because of your freedom to assemble? That's an issue that getting a permit resolves: simple scheduling of resources.
Maybe the protest is against a business I work for: What about my freedom to go to work without people shouting at me about how awful I am for working there?
Maybe the protest causes extra traffic at a busy time of day. I have a heart attack and die because the extra traffic meant the ambulance couldn't get there on time. My right to life was taken away because of the gathering, but it's an easy issue to resolve by with a permit process to ensure minimal disruptions.
What if the gathering is in the middle of the street because they're protesting building the road further through natural lands? My freedom of free movement is taken away.
I can go on and on about how something as seemingly simple as freedom of assembly has the potential to impact other people's freedom, because freedom is not as simple as you want it to be.
You insist things are black and white but when I point out a complexity, you ignore it except to repeat yourself in different ways. You have not provided any actual justification. You say that a freedom is not a freedom if there are preconditions but never answer the issue of how all laws are preconditions on freedom.
The questions I raise are not philosophical: you cannot rationally make any claims about freedom if you have not thought through these very basic issues. If you have not examined these questions then your opinions are built on air and emotion, not clear thinking and reason.
I'm done here though. Feel free to respond, but I won't reply only to have you repeat yourself and ignore anything that contradicts your wish for things to be black and white.
Sounds entirely reasonable and sane process. You have to allow these foreign embassies to prepare against potential terrorist activities. In some case when known anti-government terrorist forces are identified they have good reason to increase preparedness.
Portugal is not very competitive internationally, so their economy became dependent on government contracts and deals with politically exposed persons. For example, most of Angola's corrupt elite stashed their wealth in Portugal by buying property and businesses. Additionally, corrupt countries are very hard to do business in without kickbacks, but if you're willing to play the game, it becomes very easy, as in your businesses get a lot of government handouts, your interests are protected, etc. There is a law in Angola where foreign businesses can only enter the country if they partner with a local, and usually those "locals" are ministers, generals, the president's family and friends, etc. Local businesses are roadblocked to your benefit.
When you become comfortable operating this way, you'l do anything to maintain your relationship. And I kid you not, A large chunk of Portugals economy is powered by Angola.
Now, if a country has their hands in some of another country's largest companies, and many of them in key sectors such as banks, telecoms and energy, and in many cases becoming the biggest shareholder in such holdings, to the point where a countries own parliament has to hold sessions to protect their own bank's exposure to Angola, well, call it what you want, I'd call that large.
I worked for one of Portugal's great energy companies, both in Portugal and in Angola. I was working for them in Angola, when they were struggling financially because they could not compete with other European and and Chinese companies, both in Europe, South America and Africa, and I was there when the Angolan president's daughter bought the company and I was there when the company employees were relieved that deals would now become easier because the new majority shareholder also had the power to make the Angolan utility company sign new deals. In fact, the president's daughter forced the national utility to also become a shareholder. Even more, the forced the utility to also pay for her part of the shares. And the proud Portuguese company clapped through it all.
