As Bad as Hungary

While the Western world is rightly shocked at each revelation of Soviet oppression in Hungary, the nasty, silent tyranny in Portugal remains as it has been for the last quarter of a century. "Le Monde" apparently is the only paper to report that twenty of the fifty-two students who have been tried in Oporto have been condemned to various punishments ranging from fines to long prison sentences. This, of course, takes no notice of the many months that some of them have spent in goal or of the ruin of all their careers, acquitted or convicted alike. Nor is there any mention of the two witnesses who are said to have committed suicide under Questioning. The worst feature of the whole business is that honest Portuguese who have committed no crime except that of criticising Salazar's clerical tyranny, are being picked up and kept in prison for six months without trial or inquiry. The police need not even bother to mention their detention for that length of time. One trick is to arrest a student just before his exams, so that his professional career is blasted. Another trick is to punish people by deprivation of their civil rights; this means that in the case of law and medical students they are not allowed to practice their professions. An effective and silent form of tyranny. Professor Ruy Luis Gomez, a distinguished mathematician, and four other professors are now on trial. The professor was arrested in August. 1954, held until trial in April. 1955, and convicted. He successfully appealed, was rearrested, and is now being tried again for the offence of signing a manifesto in favour of a plebiscite in Goa.

—(From the "New Statesman," 19th June, 1957.)