Administrative Courts (Portugal)
Portugal's specialised immigration and asylum administrative courts, created July 2026 to clear AIMA backlog.
Created by diplomas Portugal's Council of Ministers approved on 23 July, these courts end Lisbon's exclusive hold on migration lawsuits, taking on part of a 124,000-case backlog against AIMA.
Last refreshed: 28 July 2026
Timeline for Administrative Courts (Portugal)
Cleared 22,436 suits between April and June via a 28-judge task force
Nomads & Communities: Portugal's backlog moves to the courtsBackground
Administrative Courts (Portugal) are a newly specialised strand of the country's Administrative Court system, carved out to hear immigration and asylum litigation specifically rather than as part of a general docket. Before their creation, anyone suing the national migration and asylum agency AIMA had to do so before a single court, the Administrative Court of Lisbon, concentrating the whole country's immigration caseload in one venue .
The reform distributes that caseload across additional courts instead of leaving it in one place, part of a wider pattern in Portuguese migration policy of restructuring institutions, such as folding the former immigration and borders service into AIMA, rather than simply adding staff to an unchanged structure .
Their significance sits less in any single ruling than in the structural shift: immigration law in Portugal is no longer adjudicated by one specialist bench in the capital but by a distributed system built to move faster on a caseload measured in the hundreds of thousands.
The courts end Lisbon's exclusive jurisdiction
These courts formalise Portugal's decision to spread migration litigation beyond the capital. Diplomas approved on 23 July 2026 strip the Administrative Court of Lisbon of its sole hold on suits against AIMA, handing the new courts jurisdiction over a caseload that stood at 124,000 outstanding lawsuits when the reform passed .
They inherit a docket already being worked down under pressure rather than a static one: a 28-judge task force cleared 22,436 suits between April and June, yet only 34% of a wider 152,000-case pool was resolved by the time the reform passed. Sustaining that clearance rate once cases are spread across more benches is the test the reform now sets these courts.