The president of the Macau Lawyers’ Association (AAM), Jorge Neto Valente, said that at the current stage (public consultation) it is difficult to understand clearly the real changes that the government wants to promote on the national security law.
Neto Valente’s comments were issued on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the new Judiciary year, where he said that the AAM has been invited by the Secretary for Security to deliver a legal opinion on the new law, which it did.
For Neto Valente, it is difficult to understand exactly the real scope of the changes as “the public consultation document has only broad concepts and principles which are not the articles of the law,” he explained.
“We need to wait for the real bill. Only when we have the real articles, can we understand what is coming,” he said, adding also that he does not feel too bothered with the fact that Macau is legislating on the matter.
“All countries have laws on national security and as China has been recently provoked by other countries in several aspects of its sovereignty and even in [matters] related to trade and other things, it’s normal that China wants to defend itself,” Neto Valente said, while noting that the Article 23 of the Macau Basic Law already regulates on this matter and that under this law nobody was ever accused or tried.
“I think that maybe that [Article 23 of the Basic Law] was enough, but let’s see. If [the bill] comes with broad concepts, then we have a problem,” he remarked, noting that besides the rule itself, the law must be very specific and concrete, taking the details of its application to the point of hairsplitting.
“The only way to prevent several interpretations and broad interpretations of the same law is to take its concepts and application to the [finer] detail,” he concluded.
