Court and procedure

Thirty-second on this list is o arresto, and it does to property what « arrest » in English does to people. A Portuguese court orders o arresto when a creditor fears the money will be gone before judgment: the account is frozen, the lorry is immobilised, the flat cannot be sold. Nobody is taken anywhere and nobody is charged with anything. For that Portuguese uses a detenção and a prisão preventiva, which belong to another body of law and another page. English reaches for different words in the civil courts: assets are « frozen », goods are « attached », and what a claimant applies for is a « freezing injunction ». The one place where English still arrests a thing rather than a person is at sea, because a ship is « arrested » in the Admiralty Court to secure a claim — which is exactly what o arresto does on dry land. So the sentence under this entry, granted without hearing the other side, is about a bank account that stopped moving, and not about anybody spending a night in a cell.