Conflict, Citizenship and Civil Society by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135259679
Goodreads: 17513052
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Portuguese case

The access of foreign residents to full civic and social citizenship is guaranteed in the Portuguese fundamental law. In fact, the Constitution is framed, as regards resident foreigners’ rights, under the principle of equity (Art. 15) – which means that foreign residents have the same rights and are subject to the same duties as Portuguese citizens – and the principle of equality (Art. 13) – which means that everyone has the same social dignity and is equal before the law. Furthermore, the main human and social rights are specified in the Constitution – life (Art. 24), good reputation (Art. 26), education (Art. 74), health (Art. 64), work (Art. 58 and Art. 59), housing (Art. 65), justice, legal representation in court (Art. 20), and social security (Art. 63) – and thus cannot be curtailed by ordinary law. But, while the guarantee of some rights (life, good reputation, justice and legal representation) is universal, the remaining rights are reserved. Although disconnected from nationality, social and economic citizenship rights are, in the Portuguese case, linked to residency status and to the social mode of economic incorporation, not to personhood. In fact, the social rights specified in the Constitution – education, health, work, housing and social security – only pertain to legal residents, and the right to several relevant social security entitlements (e.g. unemployment benefits, or a retirement pension) is directly dependent on formal employment. The exceptions to this rule are the extensions of health and education rights to illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.1 This extension, which took place in the early 2000s, was justified as much by human rights as by public health concerns (in the case of health) and the need for integration (in the case of education).2

Furthermore, Portugal signed all major international instruments on human rights and on migrant worker protection, and has also signed bilateral agreements extending social and various political rights to the main extra-communitary immigrant groups in Portugal, namely Brazilians and immigrants from the Portuguese-speaking African countries (from now on referred to as the PALOP).3 Thus, it is taking on in the international arena the responsibility for ensuring human rights and migrant worker protection described in the above mentioned documents, and the country’s political will to discriminate positively in favour of the nationals of those countries, which once comprised the Portuguese colonial empire.

In sum, the existing legal framework bars access to social and economic rights to all immigrant workers and their dependents who do not have lawful residency status and to all those who, irrespective of their residency status, are incorporated in Portuguese society in the informal economy. Or in other words, from the legal-institutional point of view, we may say that the degree of exclusion from social and economic rights is a function of the level of irregular permanence and/or of economic informality displayed by the foreign population in the country4 – quite a relevant fact, since this exclusion is extremely high in Portugal. In fact, more than half of the foreign resident population experienced

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