A complaint has officially been filed at the European Court of Human Rights by the granddaughter of Portuguese army captain Arthur Carlos Barros Basto, who was dismissed from military service and stripped of his rank and pension in 1937 for participating in the circumcision of his students.
The case of Captain Barros Basto has been compared with that of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, another Jewish military leader who was also infamously wrongly arrested, accused, and convicted of false charges due to Antisemitism.
Captain Barros Basto was the founder of the Jewish community of Porto in 1923. Together with other Jews who lived in the city, Bastos tried to bring hundreds of Portuguese Marranos back to Judaism.
These efforts were thwarted in the 1930s by slanderous anonymous letters that the state used to investigate him.
Barros Basto was condemned for participating in the circumcisions of his students. He was permanently expelled from the army, deprived of his pay, pension, and social benefits, and stripped of his uniform, military titles, and insignia.
Basto’s granddaughter, Isabel Barros Lopes, lived with her grandfather until she was seven years old and watched for decades the unsuccessful efforts of her mother Miriam Azancot and her grandmother Lea Azancot to obtain his posthumous reinstatement into the army.
Since 2011, Barros Lopes has led efforts to bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. However, despite having obtained two favorable decisions, the recommendation from parliament to the government to reinstate Barros Basto in 2012, and the proposal from the army to reinstate the officer as a colonel in 2013, the Portuguese State has made no official decision.
“This is a just cause and one where I would like to finally see justice, and not leave it to the next generation to fight,” said Barros Lopes.
“Especially with antisemitism on the rise around the world, past wrongs must be righted, and my grandfather be posthumously reinstated to the army he loved and fought for most of his life. We have given the Portuguese authorities ample opportunities to do the right thing, so now we must take our official plea to the European Court of Human Rights.”
The case became even more complex with a 2018 law that aimed to reinstate military personnel who had been wrongfully dismissed.
Even though the proponents of the law informed Barros Basto’s granddaughter that the case could finally be resolved, the Portuguese state argued in 2023 that it can only be the captain himself who requests reinstatement, to which Lopes responded that it was well known that Barros Basto died in 1961.
With this latest demand, Isabel Barros Lopes has now officially turned to the European Court of Human Rights in an official appeal for “a firm decision against the Portuguese State and an exhortation to said State to reinstate Arthur Carlos Barros Basto as colonel posthumously and to issue an apology to the family of the targeted officer for a terrible case that has been dragging on for almost a century”.
She also asks the Court to make itself available to the parties to achieve an amicable resolution of the matter.
The complaint argues that Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights has been violated, which guarantees everyone the right to a fair trial decided within a reasonable period of time.
Isabel Barros Lopes is currently the Vice-President of the Jewish Community of Porto founded by her grandfather.
The Community has just published on Amazon the book entitled “‘The Portuguese Dreyfus Case: A Scandal from 1937 heard in the European Court of Human Rights in 2024’ which is available to download here, and dedicated the feature film “Sefarad” to Captain Barros Basto in 2019, which can be watched on YouTube.
