Lisbon's Engineering School Shelves a Harassment Case Eight Lecturers Brought, Against Its Own Inspectorate's Advice, and Tells Them Not to Discuss It

Eight lecturers at the Instituto Superior Técnico (Higher Technical Institute), the University of Lisbon's engineering school and the most selective science faculty in the country, wrote to its president on 19 February 2025 to accuse a full professor of moral workplace harassment. Eighteen months later, the case has been closed with no penalty at all, against the written recommendation of the state inspectorate the president himself brought in to keep the process independent.

The president, Rogério Colaço, archived the disciplinary proceeding. The Inspeção-Geral da Educação e Ciência (Inspectorate-General for Education and Science), whose investigator ran the file, had concluded that there were grounds to sanction the professor and proposed a written reprimand, the mildest penalty in the disciplinary scale. Colaço applied nothing. He also told the eight complainants that they should refrain from commenting publicly, imposing what amounts to an institutional silence on the people who brought the complaint. Público reported the outcome on Sunday, and Diário de Notícias carried it the same morning.

The choice that decided the case before it began

The eight lecturers had asked for a processo de averiguações, an internal fact-finding inquiry with no fixed target. Colaço opened something different on 17 March 2025: a processo disciplinar, a formal disciplinary proceeding against a named individual.

That decision mattered more than anything that followed. A Portuguese disciplinary proceeding runs against a limitation period, and the practical effect here was to confine the inquiry to conduct in the previous twelve months. The complaint had described a pattern running back roughly twenty-five years. Everything outside the last year fell away as time-barred before a single fact was examined. The lawyer acting for the eight, Dantas Rodrigues, had said at the time that the disciplinary route was the shorter one and the one that gave the accused more protection, and that a fact-finding inquiry could in principle have surfaced conduct serious enough to be sent to the prosecution service.

What survived the narrowing was, on the complainants' account, a set of managerial behaviours rather than dramatic incidents: blocked academic progression, restricted access to sabbatical leave and to research resources, exclusion from particular projects and research areas, and being publicly contradicted and discredited. Manuel Heitor, a former Science Minister and the longest-serving full professor in the same mechanical engineering department, publicly supported the group when the complaint became known, praising what he called their courage and saying that only fear of internal reprisals had kept such a complaint from surfacing earlier. The professor at the centre of the case told Público he had nothing to comment.

The numbers behind the archiving

The Instituto Superior Técnico's own ombudsman office received 40 complaints in 2024 alone, of which 17 concerned moral harassment and three sexual harassment. Nationally the picture is starker. The Autoridade para as Condições do Trabalho (Authority for Working Conditions) received 3,480 complaints of moral and sexual harassment at work last year and issued 20 administrative penalties. A survey published in May 2025 found 27.7 percent of Portuguese workers saying they had been the victim of workplace harassment in the preceding year, which is a gap of several orders of magnitude between what people report privately and what the state ever acts on.

What this means for expats

• The route you pick determines what can be examined. Asking an employer for a disciplinary proceeding rather than a fact-finding inquiry can silently amputate years of history. If you are raising something historic, say so explicitly in writing and ask for an averiguações.
• An inspectorate recommendation is advice, not an order. The IGEC proposed a sanction and the institution declined it. In Portuguese public higher education the decision sits with the institution's president.
• Universities are not an exception to the national pattern. Portugal has a long record of complaints being filed and then closed quietly, as with the 17-page bullying complaint at Parliament that was archived without either named official being interviewed and the 47 discrimination complaints on which the anti-racism commission has ruled nothing.
• Know the criminal boundary. Moral harassment is a labour matter in Portugal, not a crime in itself, though specific acts within it can be. Our guide to reporting a crime sets out the six-month clock and the difference between a queixa and a denúncia.

The president of the Comissão para a Igualdade no Trabalho e no Emprego (Commission for Equality in Labour and Employment) has argued that harassment should be criminalised for its deterrent effect. The Técnico case is the argument in miniature: an inspectorate found grounds, proposed the smallest sanction available, and the institution that asked for the independent view chose not to take it.