Amnesty International's 2026 Report Flags Portugal Over Prison Mistreatment, Police Killings, Azores F-35 Transfers, and Lisbon Evictions

Amnesty International published its 2025/26 annual report on the state of human rights worldwide on Tuesday 21 April 2026, and the Portugal chapter is unusually pointed. The organisation flags new evidence of mistreatment in prisons, two active criminal proceedings over alleged unlawful police killings, restricted access to abortion, outdated protest-assembly legislation, forced evictions near Lisbon, and the landing of three US F-35 fighters destined for Israel at the Lajes Air Base in the Azores.

Prisons: Three of Ten Inspected Facilities

The report cites the Ombudsman’s July 2024 prison-inspection mechanism report, which found evidence of ill-treatment in three of the ten prisons visited that year. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture has separately raised what the Portuguese text calls systemic investigation failures, with an over-representation of foreign nationals among ill-treatment cases.

Two Live Police-Killing Cases

Amnesty highlights two criminal proceedings opened by the Public Prosecutor’s Office during the reporting period:

• July: two officers charged with aggravated kidnapping and aggravated homicide over a 2024 attack on Moroccan immigrants in Olhão, with one victim dying while handcuffed.
• October: the trial of the officer accused of killing chef Odair Moniz in Cova da Moura opened, with two further officers under investigation for perjury.

Abortion: 2,525 Portuguese Residents Travelled to Spain

Between 2019 and 2023, 2,525 Portuguese residents sought abortion services in Spain, driven primarily by Portugal’s 10-week legal limit and the prevalence of conscientious objection among Portuguese providers — most acutely in the Azores and the Alentejo, the report says.

Lajes and the Arms Trade Treaty

The most diplomatically sensitive paragraph concerns the Lajes Air Base in the Azores: the Portuguese government confirmed that at least three F-35 fighter jets, sold by the United States to Israel, made stops at Lajes in April. Amnesty says the authorisation “facilitated the transfer of weapons to Israel, violating Portugal’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty and international humanitarian law.”

Evictions and the Right to Protest

Amnesty records at least 50 families forcibly evicted in July from neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Lisbon, leaving many homeless. The report also points to decades-old protest legislation that the government has not revised despite international-standards incompatibility, citing the conviction and fining of activist Francisco Pedro for failing to notify authorities ahead of a peaceful demonstration against the new Lisbon airport.

Hate Crimes: 19 Charges from 1,020 Investigations

Between 2019 and 2024, only 19 of 1,020 hate-crime investigations resulted in charges — a conviction funnel Amnesty treats as a measure of systemic under-response rather than low incidence.

Political Read

The Amnesty report lands a day after the government’s 2025 internal-security report (RASI) showed rape reports at a decade high and prisons at 103.4% occupancy. The two documents circle different questions — internal crime statistics versus structural human-rights conditions — but they converge on the prison system and on the legitimacy of police conduct. Expect both to surface in the labour-reform and nationality-law debates already under way in Parliament, where human-rights framings are being marshalled by PS, BE, PCP, Livre, and PAN.

The Azores F-35 paragraph is the one to watch. Portugal is scheduled to host the ASD Convention on aerospace and defence next week, and the Amnesty line on Arms Trade Treaty compliance will not vanish from the news cycle before ministers arrive in Lisbon.

Sources: Amnesty International, “The State of the World’s Human Rights, April 2026”; Amnistia Internacional Portugal, “Relatório Anual 2025-26” (21 April 2026); Executive Digest (21 April 2026); Notícias do Sorraia (21 April 2026).