The “Portuguese Dreyfus” Case
A strange case has just arrived at the European Court of Human Rights, concerning a Portuguese army captain, Arthur Carlos Barros Basto; it was filed by his granddaughter, Isabel Barros Lopes.
Barro Basto has been compared to Alfred Dreyfus: both were Jewish, both were army captains, both were unfairly separated from their nation’s army because of shifty lawsuits that began with anonymous denunciations. There, however, the similarities end. While Dreyfus was reintegrated during his lifetime, Barros Basto was not, even posthumously.
It might seem strange that such an old case about an officer, who died in 1961, is still the reason for a legal battle. Barros Basto was expelled from the army in the 1930s for practicing the Jewish rite of circumcision on his students, which was deemed “immoral” by the competent authorities. The officer’s family has never let the matter drop and is still fighting on his behalf today.
Almost nine decades of justice being denied by the most unbelievable subterfuges, Barros Lopes has sued the Portuguese State at the highest European authority on human rights.
All of this has been well documented in a book recently published on by the Jewish Community of Oporto, under the title: “The Portuguese Dreyfus Case: A scandal from 1937 heard in the European Court of Human Rights in 2024.”
To know the reasons for the claim is to know the history of the Jewish Community of Oporto, founded in 1923 by Barros Basto. The captain’s last words were “One day justice will be done” and these words forever marked the life of his wife, Lea Azancot, who did everything in her power to force the State to right the injustice committed. Her efforts were fruitless, and she was even insulted by the army.
Barros Basto’s daughter, Miriam, suffered a similar fate. Miriam died knowing that, sadly, despite her many efforts she had not managed to have her father reintegrated, a mission she left to her daughter Isabel.
An economist by profession and current vice-president of the Jewish Community of Oporto, Barros Lopes has moved heaven and earth to achieve what her mother and grandmother were unable to do.
In 2012, she was successful in getting Parliament unanimously to acknowledge that Barros Basto had been the target of political and religious segregation, and in 2013, the army also acknowledged in writing that the wronged officer should be reintegrated with the rank of colonel.
All appeared to be moving towards honoring Barros Basto, who had proven his bravery in the First World War, during which he was wounded and gassed.
But nothing has happened. Barros Lopes is still waiting. A year ago, in reply to yet another of her claims, the State told her that Barros Basto himself should personally request his posthumous reintegration. The bureaucracy, inertia, and sheer Kafka-esque nature of the matter became too much.
Barros Lopes, not wishing to pass her mission on to her daughters, is invoking before the European Court of Human Rights that the principle of fair and equitable process, as provided for in the European Convention on Human Rights, has been violated.
Article 6 of the Convention guarantees that everyone is entitled to a fair and equitable process in a reasonable space of time, a situation that conflicts with an anomalous and obstacle-ridden process that has dragged out, with sometimes incredible arguments that seem to wish to await the petitioner’s demise.
The context in which all this is happening could not be more significant. In the last decade, the Jewish Community of Oporto has arguably become the most culturally vibrant Jewish organization in Europe.
As it grew, however, the community began to confront a wave of antisemitism. In the last two years alone, Barros Lopes witnessed the vandalization of Oporto’s central synagogue, bomb threats addressed to the local Jewish community, rallies for better housing which blamed the city’s “murderous Zionist landlords” and even lists with their names and that of Jewish companies in the Portuguese newspapers.
We can’t know how the European Court of Human Rights will decide the case of the “Portuguese Dreyfus.”
But we must be clear: Europe cannot allow antisemitic administrative processes that began before the Second World War and have continued for decades to the present day to drag on indefinitely, processes whose origins lie in the bad faith of the political decisionmakers who have chosen to stymie justice at every turn.
The reverberations of the court’s decision will be felt by Jewish communities across Portugal and Europe.
