The Portuguese Public Prosecutor’s Office has closed the investigation into sexual harassment at the CES [Center for Social Studies] of the University of Coimbra due to a lack of complaints

• No one ever filed a complaint against the renowned sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

• Three years after the publication of the article that started it all, this process culminated in Professor de Sousa Santos’s forced resignation from the think tank he founded and his removal from all the progressive forums of which he was a regular participant.

• The decision to close the case was made in December 2024 and has been kept secret until now, when the professor’s legal team obtained a communication from the prosecutor’s office.

  
  

The Portuguese Public Prosecutor’s Office decided to close the case file related to alleged instances of sexual harassment at the Center for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra, after analyzing the report submitted by the independent commission and the letter from the women’s collective.

The Prosecutor’s Office explains that, while the conduct described in the report could constitute crimes against sexual freedom, prosecution depends on the victims filing a complaint; however, “after analyzing the evidence gathered and the investigations conducted,” it has been verified that “none of the victims filed a complaint regarding this matter” within the six-month period.

In response to this decision, Professor Boaventura stated that “what the dismissal ruling indicates is that there were never any complaints filed against me in the only place where they should have been filed, namely, in court. Since an investigation was underway, it would have been natural for the complainants who came forward publicly to accuse me of sexual harassment to do so within the framework of that process. But they did not. And they did not because there was never any sexual harassment. That is to say, it was never the complainants’ intention that justice be served, that I be investigated, tried, or convicted of harassment. They never wanted to discuss the allegations against me in the appropriate venue, one with established rules, which is the courts. The intention was never for there to be redress or punishment. The complainants’ sole intention was to use the media to defame and cancel me. And in that they succeeded”.

The filing, which has now been made public, took place in December 2024, just two months after the Professor was forced to resign from all his positions at the institution he himself founded, an institution that has served as a benchmark for the epistemologies of the South  worldwide, marking the definitive break between the new leadership and the line of thought led by the Professor, which he described as a “covert coup d’état.” Even then, Boaventura de Sousa Santos stated that from the very beginning, he had focused all his “efforts on trying to cooperate with the investigative processes; I did not hide; I tried to avoid media circuses and ensure this was a fair process for all parties.”

When asked why he thinks it took so long to learn the Prosecutor’s Office’s decision, the professor states: “Naturally, I would have liked this decision to have been issued sooner. But since I did not have access to the entire case file, I cannot say whether the Prosecutor’s Office was slow in reaching its conclusion or not. What I can say is that this decision had already been known to the CES and, eventually, to the complainants since December 2024. The fact that no one mentioned it to them shows that there was an attempt to keep it from becoming public.”

A case that still has pending legal proceedings

Since the case began, Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos has made numerous attempts to have the case brought before the courts so that it could be subject to adversarial proceedings in accordance with the rule of law. Following the publication of the report by the CES’s Independent Investigation Commission, De Sousa Santos appeared before the Public Prosecutor’s Office to request that he be considered a suspect if deemed appropriate. When this proved ineffective, on September 26, 2024, he filed a special action for protection of personality rights [protection of good name] in civil court against the plaintiffs residing in Portugal to protect his right to a good reputation, as a means of gaining access to the allegations allegedly made against him. However, after a year of delays during which not even half of the testimonial evidence could be presented due to failed witness recordings, while the professor’s reputation remained in question, he decided to withdraw the lawsuit and opt for criminal proceedings as a last resort. This case was also dismissed,

But the legal battle is not yet over. As Boaventura himself states, “I know that three of the four complainants filed a criminal complaint against me for two reasons: First, for having mentioned, in a private voice message I sent to my inner circle, that they were, in part, responsible for the depression that plagued the anthropologist Maria Paula Meneses and that, according to the information she received from the doctors at the Champalimaud Foundation, that depression could have been the cause of the pancreatic cancer that proved fatal for her, as she passed away due to that health issue last February. My lawyers have already submitted Maria Paula Meneses’ video statements to the case file. Her statements corroborate what I said in that message. My lawyers had requested that she give a statement to be included in the record, but she was never summoned to appear.

The second reason they filed the criminal complaint was the fact that I had gone to court to defend my good name—that is, to ensure that a right of mine that had been violated was respected. What I cannot help but find strange is that they filed a complaint regarding these events, but not regarding the harassment of which they claimed to have been victims for three years.”