The Minister for Justice, Constitutional and Religious Affairs says that there are some of the judges’ demands that cannot be met urgently because the government doesn’t have the money to do so. Helena Kida says that the guarantee of the magistrates’ safety can be assessed on a case-by-case basis, but dialogue continues in order to prevent the strike from taking place.
The judges decided not to go ahead with the strike announced for 9 August, given the government’s openness to negotiations over the magistrates’ complaints.
This Thursday, the Minister of Justice, Constitutional and Religious Affairs, Helena Kida, said that although dialogue is taking place, there are issues that cannot be resolved immediately due to the lack of budget from the state.
‘Of course, [in relation to] some of the demands, we have come to the conclusion that they are not immediately answerable, they cannot be answered immediately. I’ll give you an example: the strike had been announced for August, at a time when the budget had already been approved, and resolving purely financial issues requires a budget. There were also some demands such as better housing conditions, which means we have to buy or we have to build, and that takes time,’ said the Minister of Justice.
One of the concerns raised by the magistrates is their safety. On this point, the minister said that the government is studying a way of deploying protection police for this purpose or distributing weapons to judges, without diverting the arsenal intended to combat terrorism in Cabo Delgado.
‘One thing is the right to bear arms, which magistrates have, and another would be to know which organisation has the obligation to allocate weapons. We are also looking at a situation that cannot be ignored, which is the instability in Cabo Delgado. If we have to assume that those [soldiers] who have weapons would have to give them to the magistrates, because the Police of the Republic of Mozambique and the Armed Forces of Defence and Security have weapons of war, but the weapons that must be acquired for the protection of magistrates must be for individual protection. So we have to discuss it further, to find out what the best solution is between allocating an ADC who has a weapon, but also giving a weapon to the magistrate, what the quantity of weapons would be just for this purpose,’ explained Helena Kida.
The Minister of Justice was speaking this Thursday in Maputo City on the sidelines of the opening of the National Religious Conference. At the event, Kida praised the role of the churches in maintaining peace in the country.
The seventh National Religious Conference was held under the slogan ‘Religious Confessions, United in Building a Culture of Peace in Mozambique’.
O País
