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The
Lisbon Appeals Court has given the former Polícia Judiciaria inspector,
Gonçalo
Amaral, reason concerning the injunction that had been filed
against him by
Madeleine McCann’s parents.
In a decision that is dated Thursday last week, the Appeals Court judges
have overturned the prohibition that had been decreed by the Lisbon
Civil Courts, which forbade the distribution and sales of the book
“Maddie –
The Truth of the Lie”, as well as
interviews and television reports about said book, both in Portugal and
abroad.
The McCann couple alleges that Gonçalo Amaral’s book, as well as the
interviews that he gave about it, prompt “a serious and hardly
reparable damage” to their family, especially to the twins,
Sean and Amelie.
They invoked damages to the protection of their private and family life
and damages to their good name and their image rights.
Yet, to the Appeals Court of Lisbon, “the contents of the book does
not offend any of the applicants’ fundamental rights. The exercise of
its writing and publication is included in the constitutional rights
that are ensured to everyone by the European Convention of Human Rights
and by the Portuguese Republic’s Constitution” (concerning freedom
of expression and information and freedom of press and the media).
We recall that the investigation into Maddie’s disappearance was
coordinated by Gonçalo Amaral and ended up being archived, without any
certainties concerning what happened to the three-year-old child. In the
book “Maddie – The Truth of the Lie”, the former inspector
sustains that Maddie died in the apartment where her parents were
spending their holidays, in
Praia da Luz, probably due to a
domestic accident, on the 3rd of May, 2007 – and then the McCann couple,
assisted by their friends who where on holidays with them, concealed the
cadaver.
And
he alleges that he was forced to write the book in order to defend his
reputation and to restore his professional honour, given the fact that
at a certain point in time, he was removed from the investigation before
its conclusion, through a decision from the Judiciária’s national
directory.
The judges at the Appeals Court in Lisbon compared the book with the
archiving dispatch from the investigation into Maddie’s disappearance:
“We do not find any mention to any facts in the book that are not
also in that dispatch.
Where the author (Gonçalo Amaral) differs from the Prosecutors that
wrote the dispatch is in the logical, police-work-oriented and
investigative interpretation of said facts. In that sense, we stand
before the exercise of the right of opinion, namely in a domain in which
the author is an expert, as he worked as a criminal investigator for 26
years”
Concerning the applicants’ (the
McCann couple’s) protection of private life, it is themselves
who give multiple interviews and intervene in the media, offering them
[the media] information that would otherwise hardly be published”
and
that “they voluntarily decided to limit their right to the intimacy
of private life, in order to pursue higher values like the discovery of
their daughter’s whereabouts”.
Nonetheless, in doing so, “they opened the doors for others to give
their opinion about the matter, in accordance to what they were saying,
but eventually also in contradiction with their directions, yet always
within a legitimate and constitutionally consecrated right of opinion
and freedom of expression of thought”.
The decision was issued by the Appeals judges Francisco Bruto da Costa,
Catarina Arelo Mando and António Valente.
in:
Sol, 19.10.2010 |
