Spanish
Lisbon.- The President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, vetoed this Friday the new nationality law after the Constitutional Court announced this week that it considers several articles of the text, approved by Parliament with the votes of the conservative alliance of the Government and the far-right, to be contrary to the Constitution.
The Head of State made the announcement in a statement published by the Presidency of the Republic, where he explained that he is returning the proposed amendment to the law to Parliament without enacting it due to the court's opinion, following a request from the Socialist Party (PS) to review several articles of the text. Following the Constitutional Court's decision, "the President of the Republic returned to the Assembly of the Republic, without promulgation, (...) the Assembly's Decrees" on the changes "to the Nationality Law and the Penal Code", Rebelo de Sousa specified in the note. In a letter sent to the President of Parliament, José Pedro Aguiar Branco, the President of Portugal explained that he vetoes these changes in accordance with what the Portuguese Constitution dictates, which establishes that if the Constitutional Court rules on the unconstitutionality of a norm, it must be vetoed by the Head of State.Four Unconstitutional Norms
Announcing his decision this past Monday, the president of the Constitutional Court, José João Abrantes, explained in a statement that the court's plenary found four rules of the Parliament's decree unconstitutional to alter the nationality law, having ruled unanimously on three and by majority on one.
One of the proposals that the court unanimously deemed unconstitutional is the one that seeks to prevent access to Portuguese citizenship for anyone who has been convicted of a crime and sentenced to two or more years in prison in the country, considering that the bond of integration in the Lusitanian community is put at risk.
