The Council of Ministers approved a measure on July 23 that would let lawsuits against AIMA (Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo) be heard by administrative courts across the country, rather than concentrated in Lisbon as they are today. Under current law, a case against a public entity is filed wherever that entity is headquartered, and AIMA's headquarters are in Lisbon. That rule has concentrated much of the country's AIMA litigation in a single court, the Tribunal Administrativo do Círculo de Lisboa (TACL). The measure still needs Parliament's approval, and the government hasn't given a timeline for when it would take effect.

How big the backlog actually is

More than 135,000 cases against AIMA are currently pending in Portugal's administrative courts nationally, according to figures the courts' own governing council gave to Diário de Notícias. Most of that load sits at the TACL specifically. Data the Conselho Superior dos Tribunais Administrativos e Fiscais (CSTAF) gave to Lusa in October put the TACL's pending caseload at 133,429 cases in a single category alone, "processos da 6.ª Espécie", the fast-track injunction process migrants use to compel AIMA to act on a stalled application. That number had roughly tripled in three months, up from about 50,000 in June, with new cases arriving at a rate of roughly 500 a day. Filings specifically contesting deportation orders also surged that summer: 179 injunctions and 298 main actions in a six-week window, far above the same period in 2024.

The cases cover a wide range of underlying disputes: family reunification, residency permits sought under various articles of immigration law, and, until recently, regularization requests tied to enrollment in a professional course or to the old CPLP (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa) pathway. People are suing, in many cases, because AIMA has not issued a decision on their application, leaving court action as one of the few mechanisms available to compel a response.

A specialized court, or a specialized division? The wording is doing real work

The same Council of Ministers meeting approved the possibility of creating "juízos especializados de imigração e proteção internacional", specialized divisions handling immigration, asylum, and international protection matters, including cases involving entry and stay of foreign nationals and removal proceedings. The government has been careful about the wording. Portugal has real constitutional questions around creating exclusive courts for specific subject matters, and when asked about this directly, the justice minister drew a distinction: "We are not creating any specialized court, [...] we are creating a specialized division, and we believe it complies with all the rules of constitutionality." A juízo especializado, in this framing, is a specialized division inside the existing administrative court structure, not a standalone tribunal carved out just for immigration cases, a distinction that matters legally even though the practical effect for a litigant, a court that primarily hears immigration and asylum matters, may look similar either way.

What makes this week's proposal notable is what happened the last time essentially the same idea was on the table. In February 2026, Parliament rejected a bill from Iniciativa Liberal that proposed the same core change now being revived: taking AIMA lawsuits out of Lisbon's exclusive jurisdiction and distributing them nationally. CSTAF itself gave that bill an unfavorable opinion at the time, warning it risked spreading the backlog to courts across the country rather than resolving it. The bill was also opposed by PSD and CDS-PP, the parties that support the current government. Asked this week why the government is now proposing much the same measure it and its allies rejected five months ago, the justice minister did not answer.

The proposal is broader than the jurisdiction change alone. It would keep CSTAF's power to redistribute cases, move judges to more congested courts, prioritize older filings, and manage the pool of substitute magistrates more flexibly, on top of creating the specialized divisions. It also sits inside a larger set of immigration-enforcement changes already underway under the EU's Migration and Asylum Pact, including a new dedicated foreigners-and-borders police unit inside the PSP, the rollout of the EU's Eurodac fingerprint database, and a reported €32.7 million increase in FAMI 2030 funding, bringing that fund's total support to €107.8 million.

Update: The measure reaches Parliament as a formal bill

On August 10, the government submitted the redistribution and specialized-courts measure to Parliament as an actual bill, proposta de lei n.º 98/XVII, according to Portuguese business outlet ECO. The bill formalizes the changes the Council of Ministers approved on July 23 and goes further, adding a wider set of powers for CSTAF over how cases and judges are managed across the administrative and tax courts.

Under the bill, CSTAF could set an annual maximum number of cases assigned to each judge, set deadlines for specific tasks where the law doesn't already set one, and set reference caseload values for each court to prevent individual judges from being overloaded, according to ECO. CSTAF would also gain the power to prioritize cases that have been stalled too long and, in specific circumstances, order that an individual case be accelerated, when a party requests it and legal deadlines have been exceeded "beyond what is reasonable," according to the same report. Separately, CSTAF could redistribute cases among judges working within the same court division, while still respecting the principle of random case assignment, according to ECO.

The bill would also let CSTAF reassign judges from the "quadro complementar," a reserve pool of magistrates, to a different court or specialized division within the same geographic area, according to ECO. Reassignment is intended for the same kind of occasional, temporary staffing gaps the AIMA backlog created: courts with too few judges, unfilled positions, or a heavy volume of pending cases. According to ECO, these reassignments require the judge's own agreement, cannot cause serious harm to the judge's personal or family life, and are meant to address specific, temporary staffing needs rather than serve as a permanent transfer.

The bill formally creates the specialized immigration and international-protection divisions described earlier in this article, covering cases involving the entry, presence, departure, and removal of foreign nationals, along with asylum, subsidiary protection, and temporary protection cases that fall under the administrative courts, according to ECO. The government ties the change to Portugal's obligations under the EU's Migration and Asylum Pact.

The bill covers ground beyond immigration cases specifically. It would redirect appeals of tax arbitration decisions to the Tribunal Central Administrativo matching the taxpayer's own domicile or headquarters, rather than a single central venue, according to ECO, while keeping the existing 15-day appeal window. It also sets new 48-hour windows for challenging and deciding election-related disputes at the Supreme Administrative Court, gives CSTAF oversight of judges' income and asset declarations, and creates a coordinating inspector role within the courts' inspection service, according to the same report.

The bill was approved by the Council of Ministers on July 23, the same measure this article originally reported on, and reached Parliament on August 10. If Parliament approves it and it's published in the Diário da República, the new rules would take effect 30 days after publication, according to ECO.

The task force that lost a fifth of its judges

CSTAF's own response, launched earlier this year, was a national task force of judges working the AIMA backlog on top of their regular caseload. The council opened 50 positions for the task force; only 28 judges met the eligibility requirements and agreed to participate, leaving 22 positions unfilled. The task force was designed to run six months, with a checkpoint at the 90-day mark. That first checkpoint showed roughly a fifth of the assigned caseload resolved.

The task force paused for the Portuguese courts' traditional summer recess and is due to resume in September, but with a smaller team: 23 judges instead of 28. One withdrew from the assignment; four others were removed after failing to meet the productivity targets CSTAF had set for the task force, according to DN's reporting. The task force resumes in September with fewer judges than it started with, while the national backlog remains well above 100,000 cases.

Earlier policy responses

This week's court-redistribution measure is the third distinct policy response to the same underlying pressure, and the first two both targeted the inflow of new cases rather than AIMA's capacity to process them. A change that took effect in October 2025 tightened the rules for accessing administrative courts and closed off the CPLP regularization pathway entirely. Last week, Parliament passed a government proposal eliminating two more routes into the system: regularization based on enrollment in a professional course completed in Portugal, and regularization based on having a minor child in the country. Both changes reduce the number of people who can file a certain type of claim in the first place; neither one touches how quickly AIMA itself decides the applications that are still allowed to proceed.

What the numbers say about the courts themselves

The strain isn't confined to AIMA's docket. A European Commission report on judicial performance singled out a sharp decline in Portugal's administrative courts: the average time to decide a case in first instance reached 861 days in 2024, up from 597 days in 2023, while the resolution rate (cases closed relative to cases filed) fell to 48%, down from 120% the year before. A resolution rate above 100% means courts were closing more cases than arrived that year; a rate under 50% means the backlog is growing faster than judges can clear it. CSTAF, responding to the Commission's report, said the cause was singular and identifiable: AIMA-related cases specifically, not a broader breakdown of the administrative court system. That's a notable admission on its own. It means Portugal's entire administrative justice system's performance, as measured by Brussels, is now being shaped by the caseload from a single struggling agency.

Part of a broader justice package, not a standalone fix

The court-redistribution measure was one item in a wider set of justice reforms the government approved the same day, under Justice Minister Rita Alarcão Júdice and Minister for State Reform Gonçalo Saraiva. The package also creates a dispute-resolution chamber for public procurement complaints, meant to stop appeals from dragging on indefinitely and holding up contract execution; a voluntary administrative procedure for claiming compensation from the state for civil liability, without needing to sue first; and a licensing regime for privately run, institutionalized arbitration centers handling administrative law disputes, which the government suggested could eventually take pressure off the courts by giving disputants a private-sector alternative. All of this sits under a broader National Integration Plan for immigrants the government says will be presented in September, of which the court measure is only one part.

What this actually changes, and what it doesn't

For someone with a pending case against AIMA, none of this changes anything yet. The redistribution measure and the specialized immigration divisions are now a formal bill before Parliament, but neither has been voted on, and the government has attached no effective date beyond the standard 30 days after publication if the bill passes. The specialized court divisions raised their own constitutionality questions that the government says it has resolved, but the bill still needs Parliament to act, and follows a near-identical redistribution plan that Parliament, and the government's own coalition partners, rejected just five months ago. Redistributing cases could reduce pressure on Lisbon's courts specifically if Parliament approves the measure. Whether it also shortens wait times overall will depend not only on the courts, but on whether AIMA can process applications quickly enough to slow the flow of new litigation in the first place.