The Guinea-Bissau military junta published and adopted this Thursday the “Political Transition Letter” that will serve as an organizational tool throughout the “current context of the political transition” which includes the dissolution of the Supreme Judicial Council (CSMJ) that governs the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the establishment of a National Transitional Council as a political body to implement this process that seeks to “re-establish public order.”
“The urgent need to restore public order and national security is incompatible, in the current context of political transition, with the institutional and structural obstacles of the Public Ministry,” the document stated, as reported by the Besogo newspaper O Democrata. In it, the army stresses that “it is necessary to make its procedures more flexible and simplified and to remove, simplify and revitalize bureaucracy during this transitional period, in order to protect and preserve the basic pillars and values” of the state.
Subsequently, the Council announced that the CSMJ was disbanded “as an organ of the structure of the Public Ministry,” arguing that “restoring public order and national security, preserving national unity and protecting the fundamental rights of citizens requires a more proactive, effective, dynamic, efficient and effective role” by the Public Prosecutor’s Office compared to the role it had before the coup.
Likewise, the military body established a National Transitional Council, an entity whose tasks, according to the document, will include consultation and preparation of transitional instruments, as well as political supervision of the responsible authorities during this process.
The military junta also referred to the elections and expressed its regret that the goal of the repeated transitions of this kind that the country has witnessed is to hold elections as if they were a “panacea” to solve “serious political problems.”
In this context, he defended that “in the face of a dangerous political and social situation once again, around an electoral process involving disputes and tensions, which could have turned into an ethnic civil war, the armed forces were forced to intervene, causing a new change of the constitutional order by force.”