Portuguese Dreyfus case reaches the European Court of Human Rights
Captain Barros Basto founded the Jewish community of Oporto in 1923 - his granddaughter is fed up with 'miserable case' that has dragged on for 90 years
A complaint was filed last week at the European Court of Human Rights by the granddaughter of Portuguese army captain Arthur Carlos Barros Basto, who was dismissed from service in 1937 for participating in circumcision operations on his students.
As reported by Jewish News, Captain Barros Basto, together with Ashkenazim who lived in the city, founded the Jewish community of Porto in 1923.
He also tried to bring hundreds of Portuguese Marranos back to Judaism. His efforts were thwarted in the 1930s by slanderous anonymous letters that the state used to investigate him.
Alleged homosexuality reported in the letters, then a crime capable of destroying the reputation of any person, especially of a Jewish leader, was completely unproven by the military court, but was another fact was used to make the conviction possible.
The complaint reads: “This claim must be classified as urgent and treated as a priority, as it concerns the case known worldwide as the “Portuguese Dreyfus” given the similarities between the dismissal from service of Alfred Dreyfus (the French Dreyfus) and his contemporary, Barros Basto (the Portuguese “Dreyfus”); both were army captains and both were dismissed from military service in sordid cases that resulted from slanderous anonymous letters.”
Condemned for conducting circumcisions on his students, Barros Basto received as a penalty “dismissal from service” which permanently expelled him from the army.
It also deprived him of his salary, social benefits, prohibited him from using his uniform, military distinctions and insignia, but kept him subject to military discipline, to being tried again at any time and condemned for any fact that the military might deem incompatible with the “prestige of the function” (which he no longer exercised) or offensive to the “decorum of the uniform” (which he no longer wore).
Isabel Barros Lopes, who lived with her grandfather until she was seven-years-old, watched for decades the efforts of her mother, Miriam Azancot, and her grandmother, Lea Azancot, to obtain his posthumous reinstatement as an officer in the army.
Since 2011, she herself has undertaken efforts to bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion.
But despite having obtained two favourable decisions – the recommendation of the parliament to the government to reinstate Barros Basto (2012) and the proposal of the army to reinstate the officer as a colonel (2013) – Lopes has not seen the government act accordingly.
Frustrated by the whole process, Isabel Barros Lopes is now asking the European Court for “a firm decision against the Portuguese State and an exhortation to said State to reintegrate posthumously the “Portuguese Dreyfus” as colonel and to issue an apology to the family of the targeted officer for a miserable case that has been dragging on for almost a century.”
She also asks the Court to make itself available to the parties with the aim of achieving an amicable resolution of the matter.
Isabel Barros Lopes is currently the vice-president of the Jewish community of Porto, founded by her grandfather.
The community has just published a book about the Scandal, which can be found here.
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