Portuguese prosecutors open a probe into US flights through Lajes during the Iran war

Portuguese prosecutors said on Saturday that they had opened an inquiry into the government's authorisation of United States flights through Lajes Air Base, in the Azores, during the Iran war. The Prosecutor General's Office said the probe followed a complaint by members of the Left Bloc. The party had asked prosecutors in April to investigate, and called the use of the base a gross violation of international law. The Foreign Ministry declined to comment.

The legal hinge is the status of the base agreement. In peacetime the United States can use Lajes without a fresh Portuguese authorisation. Once hostilities have begun, Portugal has to approve. Portugal, unlike Spain, authorised several US transit flights through the base. Left-wing parties treated that as a choice to take part. The government treated it as a lawful use of a standing facility.

Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel has said Portugal is not a party to the conflict, and that the flights complied with international law. He has said authorisation came only after Washington gave assurances that any operation would be defensive, necessary and proportionate, and limited to military targets. Left Bloc coordinator Jose Manuel Pureza has called that account a fabrication, and has said the base was used for aggressive purposes. He also said that by opening a file the Prosecutor General's Office was accepting that the April complaint had enough in it to be looked at. An inquiry is not a finding. It means the complaint was not thrown out.

Lajes, on Terceira island, has been the mid-Atlantic stop for American aircraft moving between the United States and the Middle East for decades. A transit flight can be a tanker, a transport, or a combat aircraft that only takes fuel. The political argument in Lisbon is about which of those used the base, and whether a transit in a war counts as assistance. The agreement's peacetime clause does not answer that. The wartime clause does, if the prosecutors can establish when hostilities began in the sense the treaty uses, and what Lisbon approved after that date.

The Left Bloc filed in April. Prosecutors moved on 3 October. The gap of roughly half a year is part of the story. A complaint that sits until the war is still going, and until a G7 stock release and a third US carrier deployment are in the news, arrives in a different room from a complaint filed in the first weeks. The office has not said who is leading the inquiry, what documents it has asked the Foreign Ministry for, or whether Rangel's assurances from Washington are in the file.

What Saturday fixed is the existence of the file. Spain did not authorise the same transit. Portugal did. The opposition says that was illegal. The foreign minister says it was defensive and cleared in advance. The prosecutors will now have to say which of those sentences survives the agreement.