An idea "that has been around for a long time", according to the lawyer specializing in labor law, who sees the award as "a responsibility and an incentive" to continue on the path he has taken "of defending the weakest". "Here [in Portugal] there is a process that has been going on for a long time and that aims, on the one hand, to stifle and eliminate voices that can be uncomfortable and play an irreplaceable role in defending citizens' rights, and, on the other hand, (...) to hand over a significant market share [of Portuguese lawyers] (...) to large audit multinationals", said Garcia Pereira in an interview with Lusa, shortly after receiving the news that he was the winner of the fourth edition of the ProPública Nelson Mandela Award. And he points to the latest legislative changes, which change the status of the Portuguese Bar Association, as a major step towards achieving that goal. "These latest changes have a very clear objective, which is to end the autonomy and self-government in the profession (...) often with a pseudo-modern guise of combating corporatist remnants (...) and, therefore, in the name of the sacrosanct freedom of economic initiative, in particular", he added. For Garcia Pereira, whether through the so-called interdisciplinarity or through the subjection of the supervision of the exercise of the profession of lawyer "to entities foreign to it", the latest legislative changes, which came into force on April 1, represent "the loss of autonomy and self-regulation of the profession". Therefore, he believes that if these legislative changes are maintained, "in the very short term", this will mean "the destruction of most law firms" in Portugal. "Even the large" Portuguese law firms that might think that "they would be immune to this process are completely mistaken", he warned. Thus, he concludes that from the moment that Portugal ceases to "have lawyers and their autonomous organizational structures (...) without mechanisms of economic dependence or legal supervision over them by other interests, free and independent advocacy in Portugal has ended". For the lawyer, after Pires de Lima as President of the Portuguese Bar Association, there were no more unifying leaderships. And the order, throughout its history, has played an "irreplaceable role in this defense of lawyers' rights". "I do not want to hurt anyone's feelings, but obviously I think that after Dr. António Pires de Lima, president of whose General Council I had the honor of being a part of, we never again had a leader of the legal profession capable of uniting the entire class around concrete objectives and of demonstrating the firmness to take this fight as far as necessary, in defense of fundamental principles", he said. For Garcia Pereira, the professional class faces two phenomena: "a deliquescence of the civic, political and social formation of people in general and also of jurists, namely lawyers and, on the other hand, an absence of leaders who are up to the events". At 71, António Garcia Pereira holds a master's and doctorate in Legal Sciences, in the area of Labor Law, from the Faculty of Law of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and in 1999 he created his own law firm -- Garcia Pereira & Associados. In 2023, he was included in the list of "10 Most Influential Labor Lawyers in Portugal", by the Business Today Lawyer Awards 2023. In addition to being a lawyer, he was a professor and politician, having been a member of the MRPP since 1974, a party he left in 2015. Read Also: Nelson Mandela Award for Garcia Pereira for "courage to denounce excesses" (Portuguese version)