Deaf Residents Lost Their Direct Line to 112 in December 2021, and Nearly Five Years On Nothing Has Replaced It

Deaf people in Portugal have had no way of contacting the emergency services on their own since December 2021, when the service behind the MAI112 application stopped working. Nearly five years later there is still no replacement, and the minister responsible says he learned of the situation only recently.

Hélder Nunes, president of the Associação de Famílias e Amigos dos Surdos (Association of Families and Friends of the Deaf), put it starkly in remarks reported on Thursday and carried by Observador: "the deaf population has been returned to a state of primitive dependence."

What the App Did

MAI112 was launched on 15 July 2019 by the Secretaria-Geral do Ministério da Administração Interna (Secretariat-General of the Ministry of Internal Administration), more than two years after it was first announced by Ana Sofia Antunes, then Secretary of State for the Inclusion of People with Disabilities. It arrived on Android first, with an iPhone version following later.

Its central feature was an SOS button that opened a video call answered by a Portuguese Sign Language (Língua Gestual Portuguesa, or LGP) interpreter working alongside an operator at the Centro de Orientação de Doentes Urgentes, the dispatch centre that actually sends the ambulance. A deaf caller could sign the emergency directly to a person who understood them, while the CODU operator listened to the interpreter and dispatched. The app also sent the caller's geolocation and offered a written chat channel for anyone who preferred to type. Data and SMS use inside the app were free.

It began as a six-month pilot with seven LGP interpreters on the rota. Portugal has roughly 85,000 deaf people.

Five Years of Silence

Since the service stopped, a deaf person who needs an ambulance, the fire brigade or the police has to find a hearing person to make the call. AFAS says the consequence is not confined to deaf callers: if the only person available to raise the alarm for someone else in danger happens to be deaf, that emergency goes unreported too. The association says it receives accounts of exactly this.

The gap has been raised formally. In March the matter reached the floor of the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic), with a recommendation to the government that MAI112 be reactivated and made fully available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Six months on, the Minister of Internal Administration, Luís Neves, said he had "only recently become aware of the situation", that he was carrying out his "analysis and framing" of it, and that he would return to the case once he had gathered the information needed to define where matters stand.

AFAS wants something more durable than a restart: an accessible emergency channel built into the 112 system itself and funded through the State Budget, rather than a project dependent on a rolling contract for interpreters.

The Secretariat-General's own web page for the app is still live and still describes MAI112 in the present tense, listing videoconference with simultaneous LGP interpretation, caller geolocation, predefined messages and free-text messaging among its features. The page carries no notice of suspension. It was last updated in March 2025.

A Familiar Pattern

The case fits a diagnosis Portugal's own disability monitor delivered to the United Nations this week, when it told the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that the legal framework is largely in place and the practical experience depends on where you live and what happens to be running. A statutory right to reach emergency services is worth little if the only accessible route to them has been switched off for half a decade.

It also lands on a system already under strain. Portugal's emergency dispatch network has had a difficult two years, including a two-hour computer failure that left roughly 50 calls undispatched at the northern centre in July.

What This Means for Expats

• There is currently no accessible route to 112 for deaf residents. If you or a family member is deaf or hard of hearing, assume that reaching emergency services requires a hearing intermediary until an official replacement is announced.
• Arrange a nominated contact in advance. A neighbour, building manager or friend who can be reached by video call or text and who will make the 112 call on your behalf is, in practice, the current system.
• Sign language provision is national, not universal. LGP is a distinct language from British, American or other national sign languages, so an interpreter arrangement made abroad does not transfer.
• Know the general emergency structure. Our guide to 112, INEM and the SNS 24 line sets out who answers what and how triage works once help arrives.
• Disability status carries other entitlements. Residents with a certified degree of incapacity may qualify for support under the Prestação Social para a Inclusão, which is administered separately from anything to do with emergency access.

The minister has promised to come back to the case. What he has not given is a date, a budget line or a technical plan, and the parliamentary recommendation from March has produced no visible result. For the moment, a Portuguese resident who cannot hear still cannot call for help.