Portugal's Council of Ministers approved diplomas on Thursday 23 July creating specialised immigration and asylum Administrative Courts, and proposed ending Lisbon's exclusive territorial jurisdiction over lawsuits against AIMA (Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo), the agency that issues residence permits to every foreign national in the country1. Three official figures came attached to the decision: 152,000 cases pending in first-instance administrative and fiscal courts, a resolution rate of 34 per cent, and a 216 per cent rise in case volume between 2023 and 2024.
The government has spent a year citing a falling AIMA caseload, down to 30,000 files from roughly a million inherited when the SEF border service was dissolved in 2023. That number counts paperwork sitting inside the agency. It does not count the 124,000 lawsuits immigrants have filed against AIMA for never processing them, which sit in a different queue, in a different building, and grow for the same reason.
Portuguese administrative law, rather than litigious applicants, produced that wave. Where a public body misses its statutory decision deadline, an action to compel a decision is fast and cheap relative to waiting, so missed deadlines convert into court filings at close to one for one. A 28-judge task force at the Superior Council of Administrative and Tax Courts cleared 22,436 of the suits between April and June: 5,691 rulings in April, 8,705 in May, 8,040 in June, plus more than 47,000 procedural actions2. It has stopped for judicial recess and resumes in September under a six-month operational plan. The president of the Supremo Tribunal Administrativo has said far more than 28 judges would be needed to hit the 2029 clearance target.
For a D8 visa applicant the jurisdiction change matters more than the new courts do. Every action against AIMA currently lands in Lisbon whatever the claimant's address, so one court district absorbs the litigation of an entire country and a family in Faro or Braga queues behind everyone else. Redistribute the filings and the same suits are worked by dozens of benches rather than one. Parliament has not approved the change, no date is set, and it has been folded into a National Plan for Immigrant Integration expected in September. In June, D8 holders were still waiting roughly nine months for a first residence card, and under the nationality law promulgated on 3 May the citizenship clock only starts once that card is issued.
