According to Carlos Blanco de Morais, Justice and Security constitute fundamental purposes and tasks of the State and, in Brazil, they are part of one of the strongest programmatic points of the public policy of the current Executive, because they correspond to an area marked by critical deficits, but also by notable advances that had tectonic effects in the country.

Also according to the scientific coordinator of the VII Lisbon Legal Forum, these were great motivators for the topic Justice and Security to be chosen as the motto of the Forum, a meeting held in the Portuguese capital that brings together representatives of the Judiciary, Legislative and Executive of Brazil and Portugal. The Forum, believes Blanco, plays a crucial role in strengthening relations between the two countries, regardless of political and economic circumstances.

“Brazil and Portugal have never achieved such an intense degree of legal cooperation as today. Law has been one of the strategic bridges of contact and a quick way of sharing and reciprocal knowledge, unprecedented in past decades”.

Check out the main excerpts from the interview:

What is the relevance for both countries of the Lisbon Legal Forum being the result of a partnership between Brazil and Portugal?

Brazil and Portugal have never achieved such an intense degree of legal cooperation as today. Law has been one of the strategic bridges of contact and a fast way of sharing and reciprocal knowledge, unprecedented in past decades. The Lisbon Forum, which is being held with enormous success for the seventh consecutive year, is the most emblematic symbol of this cooperation since, due to the current and attractive nature of the topics chosen together, together with great jurists, some of the leading figures in the Judiciary, Legislative and Executive of the two States.

The fact that the President of the Portuguese Republic, a leading professor of national Public Law and Professor at the Lisbon Law School, opens or closes, as a rule, these meetings, demonstrates the academic and institutional impact of this initiative. People of the most diverse legal and political sensibilities freely discuss current legal, institutional, and economic problems, creating lasting ties and the will to return again and again, with new ideas, challenges and many provocations.

Regardless of whether there is a greater or lesser increase in economic relations or a greater rapprochement or greater coolness in diplomatic relations between the two sister States, basically conjunctural realities that come and go, the Forum remains a permanent initiative, operates with a long-term vision, moves in deep waters and aims to cement a communion of belonging between the two peoples and of collaboration between legal intellectuals, working with concrete realities.

How do you assess the evolution of the meeting over the past seven years?

The seven meetings followed Constitutional Law Seminars, which in previous years were held annually and in a pioneering manner, by two leading figures in Portuguese-Brazilian Constitutional Law, Professor Jorge Miranda and Professor Manoel Gonçalves Ferreira Filho, who have since retired, although they continue to participate in current events.

The Portuguese-Brazilian Forums, which began as Congresses, resulted from an academic partnership and a personal friendship between me, as professor at the Law School, and Minister Gilmar Mendes, founding professor of the IDP, and then joined the Getulio Vargas Foundation, which enhanced a notable increase in scale in the scientific relevance of the meetings.

Both the Lisbon Law School, the IDP and FGV have always encouraged the exchange of different points of view among the participants, the heated debate between opposing positions, the confrontation of controversial issues and the choice of a joint research domain with practical relevance and a vision of the future. At the end of each Forum, the speeches of the various speakers are published.

This year, we have many current and interesting topics to discuss and a group of first-rate Portuguese, Brazilian, Spanish, and German speakers. On the other hand, we are very excited about the joint research projects that workshop on Democracy and Social Networks will be developed, within the framework of the international project 'Governance 4.0', of which FGV is a strong dynamizer.

Justice and Security are the motto of the debates in Lisbon this year. What motivated the choice of these themes, especially this year?

Justice and Security constitute fundamental purposes and tasks of the State and, in Brazil, they are part of one of the strongest programmatic points of the current Executive's public policy, because they correspond to an area marked by critical deficits, but also by notable advances that had tectonic effects in the country, such as Operation Car Wash. Now, in my opinion, what better speaker to address the lines of force of this same policy than Minister Sérgio Moro, a friend of Portugal and of our Faculty, who will speak as the keynote speaker on the first day?

For its part, the Social Security reform, clearly considered by the current Executive to be the most decisive public policy of the present time and the key to the vaulting of the Federal Government's financial sustainability, will have an important panel of debaters, led as keynote speaker by one of its architects, the Special Secretary of Social Security Rogério Marinho.

Very current topics such as Security, the Penitentiary Crisis, tax reform, reforms in the criminal and criminal procedure areas, and judicial activism will be discussed by renowned Brazilian and also Portuguese speakers, on an unusually loaded agenda. At the end, we will have a stimulating debate on relations between powers, with the presence of politicians of various political tendencies, such as President Alcolumbre, senators Anastasia and Jaques Wagner, and Governor Ibaneis Rocha. The Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs will attend the event, giving the closing lecture.

What fruits, in terms of improving institutions and public policies, can the 7th Lisbon Legal Forum bring to Brazil and Portugal?

Everything will depend on the content of the interventions and debates. From a distance, the speakers speak more freely and debate less tenaciously, since the environment is conducive to a more in-depth, more technical approach, and more focused on substantive policies than on party foam.

This year, only the last panel will discuss institutional reforms, which have been thoroughly discussed in previous forums, where the criticism of Coalition Presidentialism and the migration to semi-presidentialism has been much dissected.

This year there will be more talk of major public policies in areas of interest to both countries: Justice, Security, Social Security, Penal System, prison system and tax system. I believe that we, the Portuguese, will learn more this year with the proposals that flow in the new Brazilian political cycle on these issues.

This year's forum will address Fake news and the regulation of information in cyberspace. Why is this topic on the agenda of this year's meeting?

Today there is a very critical discourse on the part of media professionals on social networks. In antithesis to these, professionals demand their aristocratic scrolls of freedom, exemption, rigor, and transmission of training content, stressing that without a free media there would be no free society. Therefore, in his opinion, it would be a risk for free society for information to pass from the hands of professionals to the deforming and robotic networks of cyberspace.

The defense of the professional press must be carried out, despite the fact that outside the corporate logic of a supposed monopoly of truth that never, strictly speaking, existed. The professional media had the exclusive purpose of guiding opinions and forming awareness, and now they have to share this task with informal competitors on the networks, where uncontrollability prevails. Having to survive, with heavy wage burdens, fluctuating circulation or audience fluctuations, the media is confronted with low-cost news outlets where a large number of citizens collect information, especially from Facebook or WhatsApp.

What are the consequences of these ongoing transformations?

In this diffuse network pluralism, democratic freedom means that everyone consumes the news they want and in the format they understand, both trustworthy and torrents of videos and junk information, which the algorithms indicate is their preference. Now, the denial of reluctant and perhaps less cultured citizens to access a different and more enlightened opinion cannot be suppressed by a state Big Brother that censors this choice and imposes on them the consumption of politically correct media. The time when the media said “we decided the content, and you read” ended.

Media professionals have greater demands on filtering news and on the acuity of transmitted content than networks. In electoral campaigns, they even list fake news, which is a task of public relevance. However, it would be an exaggeration to erect them as guardians of truth and exemption, respectful of privacy and good names, or immune to Hate Speach.

The controversial and undeserved victory of populist candidates in the USA and Brazil, operated through network communication, entailed not only the defeat of their direct opponents and the political establishment, but also of the professional media that tenaciously opposed them. It's about a Case study That we will follow in our workshop. Therefore, it is not enough to say that without free professional media there is no free society. It should be added that this free society does not exist without media and without freedom on the networks.

Cyberspace, due to the political and security importance it has assumed, cannot be a “lawless land”. At the political and electoral level, the ease with which false, defamatory, or violent news is multiplied and the way in which this multiplication impacts the electorate lacks a point of order in the name of the quality of democracy. How to do it without sacrificing the essential content of freedom of expression is the most complex challenge and must be achieved somewhere between two extremes: that of libertarianism and censorship prohibitionism.

Trollism on networks and in certain digital press detracts from democracy, but censorship, directly or through private content providers in cyberspace, threatens its existence.

We bring, in this workshop, excellent speakers from European universities, such as Evgeny Morozov, Dan Vielsch, Vesting, Balaguer Callejón and Sofia Ranchordàs to discuss the topic included in the international research project “Social Networks and Democracy”. We will have several academics and journalists to participate as assistants or debaters.