The tricky business of attributing a value to a lost human life begins, as the government sets a €70,000 base amount to compensate the families of those who died in Portugal's deadly fires this summer.
It will be up to the justice system to establish the precise value to be attributed to each of the deaths resulting from the June and October infernos that swept through countryside in the central region, killing 110 people, with two still unaccounted for.
The council for attributing compensation to the victims of the fires has delivered its report to the Prime Minister, suggesting a basic compensation level of €70,000 for loss of life, to which can be added two more criteria to boost payouts.
A former president of the Constitutional Court, Sousa Ribeiro, who also is a law professor at the University of Coimbra, said that a victim's suffering before death and the injury to family members also would be taken into account when working out compensation.
As for the second criterion, the suffering that the victim had before his death as a result of the fire, "Here, we assume that it existed in all cases," said Ribeiro.
The third criterion, for "compensation for damages directly suffered by the victim's next of kin," is the so-called 'damage of affection, attachment, or distress' suffered by a family after a family member had passed away," explained the professor.
The sum of these three components will give the overall amount of compensation to which each beneficiary will be entitled, according to Ribeiro who added that there is no way that council could go into as much detail for each case - that's for the courts to decide.
"In fact, there is the report by Professor Xavier Viegas, which is very detailed but does not go down to this level of detail. Therefore, the council chose to establish a basic criterion, adding two more categories, which allows adjustments and variations taking into account the circumstances of each death that are possible to determine," said the university professor.
