Criminal cases could be left out of legal aid

People charged in criminal cases could no longer be allowed to request judicial aid, according to a draft law being discussed at the Legislative Assembly, legal experts have warned.
Currently the Macau legislation states that “in criminal cases the legal aid can only be granted to defendants and to those on whose accusation the prosecution is dependent on”.
But the government proposal includes penal cases among the situations in which legal aid will not be provided. Experts quoted by Chinese-language newspaper Macau Daily News (Ou Mun Iat Pou) fear the new law will contradict the principle of providing free-of-charge legal aid to people who lack the financial means to defend themselves.
They warned that most cases that reach local courts are criminal ones, involving over 10,000 defendants a year. The experts believe many of those defendants are people with few resources to hire an attorney.
Currently the number of requests for judicial aid is much higher for defendants involved in criminal cases than those involved in administrative or civil proceedings, they stressed. The experts called on the government to clarify the law.
Macau Daily Times repeatedly tried to get a comment from the Lawyers’ Association on the draft law on the judicial aid system but has so far received no reply.
The proposal, which passed first reading at the Legislative Assembly last month, acknowledges that the current fees paid to lawyers for judicial aid services fall short of what would be required.
Lawyer fees have remained unchanged for the last decade, between MOP 200 and 7,500. The minimum and maximum figures will be set later in a Chief Executive dispatch, “after hearing the opinion of the Macau Lawyers Association”.
The association led by Jorge Neto Valente will also have something to say regarding how lawyers are appointed to provide judicial aid. The whole procedure will come out of an agreement between the association and the new Judicial Aid Commission.
This public commission will be in charge of reviewing requests for legal assistance, replacing local courts, to ease the judicial system’s workload.