Portugal's president, António José Seguro, let a key deadline pass on Friday without sending an immigration bill to the Constitutional Court, leaving him with the choice of promulgating the measure or vetoing it.
The bill, approved by Parliament on July 30, repeals Article 82, §7 of the Lei de Estrangeiros, the provision that has long allowed a residence-renewal application to be treated as automatically approved if AIMA, the country's immigration agency, failed to issue a decision within 60 working days for reasons not attributable to the applicant. The same bill extends the existing 90-day deadline for first-time residence applications by 30 days.
Under Portuguese constitutional procedure, the president can promulgate a decree, veto it, or, within an eight-day window, request preventive review by the Constitutional Court. That window closed on August 7 without a referral, leaving Seguro with roughly until August 19, 20 days from the decree's receipt at the Presidency, to promulgate or veto it.
If promulgated, the bill will still have to be published in the Diário da República before it can take effect.
The legislation is part of a broader package that also ends two other routes for obtaining residence from inside Portugal: applying for a permit on the basis of enrollment in a vocational course, and regularization on the basis of having a minor child in Portugal. The government says more than 20,000 immigrants used the vocational-course route after a scheduling window opened in April.
A Different Tacit-Approval Fight
The change should not be confused with the earlier dispute over tacit approval in family-reunification cases. That mechanism sits in a different provision of the Lei de Estrangeiros, Article 105, and was the subject of a separate Constitutional Court fight in 2025, which struck down an earlier attempt to eliminate it alongside a tripled decision deadline. A narrower version was later promulgated and is now in force. The bill now awaiting Seguro's decision concerns the separate tacit-approval mechanism for delayed residence-renewal applications under Article 82.
Separately, on August 7, Seguro referred a different decree, the "Lei do Retorno," covering asylum, detention, and removal procedures and approved by Parliament on July 17, to the Constitutional Court, citing concerns over provisions affecting children and the timing of removals relative to judicial review. That referral concerns a different part of immigration law and does not affect the residence-renewal provision discussed here.