Eve of Friday's Prosecutor Strike — SMMP Report Pegs the Ministério Público's Staffing Hole at 162 Magistrates and 267 Court Officials
Paulo Lona's union goes public with a region-by-region staffing map on the eve of Friday's national walkout. Lisbon is short 47 first-instance prosecutors, Évora 36, Porto 26, Coimbra 26, and the superior courts 27. One magistrate in Alenquer is carrying 2,700 open inquiries.
On the eve of Friday's national prosecutor strike, the Sindicato dos Magistrados do Ministério Público (SMMP) published a region-by-region staffing audit that frames the walkout in unusually concrete terms. The union's report, summarised by Público on Thursday, 23 April 2026, says the Ministério Público is no longer suffering from isolated staffing gaps but is "functioning in structural rupture, supported by the extraordinary effort of its professionals."
The Numbers the Union Wants on the Record
According to the SMMP's audit, Portugal's first-instance prosecution service is short 135 magistrates, distributed across the four main judicial districts as follows: Lisbon lacks 47, Évora 36, Porto 26, and Coimbra 26. The superior courts — the appellate tier — are missing a further 27, bringing the first-instance and higher-court shortfall to 162 magistrates. The court-staff picture is worse: 267 missing judicial officials, with roughly half concentrated in the north. Porto accounts for 51 of those vacancies and Braga for 71.
The workload figures the union cites are what will make Friday's strike hard to dismiss as bureaucratic positioning. Each magistrate, on average, is managing between 800 and 1,800 open inquiries. One prosecutor in Alenquer, north of Lisbon, is carrying 2,700. Paulo Lona, president of the SMMP, described the accumulated pressure bluntly in statements carried by Observador: the strike, he said, "is a legitimate instrument of reaction" and "a necessary, proportional and unavoidable response."
What the Strike Is About
Friday's stoppage is not, at its core, a pay dispute. It is a fight over specialisation. The immediate trigger is the 2025 annual movement — the internal reshuffle that assigns prosecutors to courts and functional areas — in which the Conselho Superior do Ministério Público approved rules that allow a single magistrate to accumulate unrelated specialty areas, including family and minors alongside labour or commerce. The SMMP argues this effectively dismantles specialisation at a moment when casework is at record highs, and that it was approved despite the Procurador-Geral da República, Amadeu Guerra, having stated in June 2025 that areas such as family and minors or labour should not be combined with others and that the rules should be reformed. Guerra ultimately voted against the solution he had publicly called for — a contradiction the union has hammered on in the weeks leading up to Friday.
The Infrastructure Angle
The SMMP audit does not stop at headcount. It documents what the union calls "serious infiltrations, exposed asbestos, electrical installations with moisture, offices without minimum conditions, absence of interrogation rooms." Those are not rhetorical flourishes. They are specific building-condition allegations against buildings run by the Instituto de Gestão Financeira e Equipamentos da Justiça, and they sit alongside the union's demand for IT modernisation and judicial-building rehabilitation as part of the full list of Friday's grievances.
The Union's Five Demands
The SMMP's formal demands, tabled for the strike, are: urgent recruitment of magistrates and court staff; reversal of the 2025 decision allowing accumulation of unrelated specialty areas; modernisation of IT and technical resources; rehabilitation of judicial buildings; and career-progression improvements. The union is also pressing for the formation of 120 new magistrates and the complete staffing of the superior courts, plus the creation of the planned Departments of Criminal Investigation and Action (DIAP) that have been announced but not stood up.
What Friday Will and Won't Change
A one-day prosecutor strike does not shut down the courts. Urgent services — detentions, habeas corpus proceedings, inquiries with minors — continue under the minimum-services rules that govern judicial stoppages in Portugal. What it does is delay non-urgent inquiries, postpone interrogations and hearings, and signal to the Conselho Superior do Ministério Público and to the government that the rules approved in the 2025 movement will not be accepted without a fight in the 2026 cycle. Whether Friday's stoppage pulls the Procurador-Geral back toward his June 2025 position, or hardens the current rules into permanence, is the question the SMMP is forcing onto the table.
