President Seguro Promulgates Diploma Extending the 'Direito ao Esquecimento' to HIV, Hepatitis C and Diabetes — Cancer Survivors, Chronic Patients and Disabled Borrowers Move Closer to a Non-Discriminatory Credit and Insurance Market

President António José Seguro has promulgated the Assembly of the Republic diploma that widens Portugal's “direito ao esquecimento” — the right-to-be-forgotten regime on home, consumer and insurance credit — to cover patients who have lived with HIV, Hepatitis C and Diabetes, on top of the oncological diseases that were the core of the original 2021 law.

The promulgation, signed on 22 April 2026 and reported by Lusa and the presidency's press service, removes the last political hurdle before the diploma lands in the Diário da República and becomes enforceable against Portuguese banks, insurers and credit mediators.

For expatriates who have been quietly pushed toward higher premiums, larger down-payments or outright refusals when buying a home, a car or life cover because of a medical history — or because of a disability reported on an insurance questionnaire — it is the most material consumer-finance change of 2026 so far.

What Changes

The original framework, Lei n.º 75/2021 of 18 November 2021, came into force on 1 January 2022. It banned credit institutions, insurers and insurance distributors from refusing to negotiate, imposing more onerous conditions or demanding harsher procedures on a consumer solely because that consumer had overcome, or was living with a mitigated version of, a severe health risk or a disability.

In practice, the 2021 law was built around oncological disease. It set the rule that, once a defined waiting period after the end of active treatment had passed, the patient could contract mortgage credit, consumer credit and the life / health insurance attached to those products without having to disclose the prior disease.

The diploma promulgated on 22 April 2026 expands the covered health categories to:

• Oncological disease (unchanged from 2021)
• HIV
• Hepatitis C
• Diabetes (both type 1 and type 2, on the reading taken by the parliamentary working group)

It also closes two loopholes that consumer groups and the Autoridade de Supervisão de Seguros e Fundos de Pensões (ASF) had flagged as the main reason the 2021 regime failed to change lender behaviour on the ground:

• A concrete grelha de referência — a reference grid of waiting periods after the end of therapeutic protocol and adjuvant treatment — which the executive had already embedded in Decreto-Lei n.º 79/2026 of 17 March (in force since April 2026) for oncological disease, and which now extends conceptually to the new categories.
• A formal duty on banks, sociedades financeiras, mutual insurance societies, payment institutions, electronic-money institutions, providence institutions, insurance companies and insurance distributors (brokers and mediators) to accept the right-to-be-forgotten claim, with an effective complaints and alternative-dispute-resolution channel.

Why the Expansion Matters

Portugal has the highest prevalence of diabetes in Western Europe — around 9.8 per cent of the adult population according to the Observatório Nacional da Diabetes — and one of the lowest per-capita rates of cancer mortality in the EU precisely because of strong screening and long-term survivorship. Both populations — diabetic borrowers and long-term cancer survivors — have complained for years that the questionário médico attached to mortgage-linked life insurance is the choke point of the Portuguese real-estate market.

The typical pattern the 2021 law was meant to break: a 42-year-old applicant, treated for breast cancer at age 32 with no recurrence, applies for a 30-year mortgage. Bank approves the credit in principle. The insurer attached to the bank offers life cover at a premium 40–70 per cent above the standard rate, or refuses to cover the borrower outright. Without life cover, the mortgage offer evaporates.

The 2026 expansion extends that protection to:

• HIV-positive residents on stable antiretroviral therapy with undetectable viral load — a population that has grown sharply in Portugal with the expansion of CPLP residency and a large Brazilian and African cohort registered in the SNS. Multiple recent studies, including the 2024 ECDC cascade analysis for Portugal, put the 'U = U' (undetectable equals untransmittable) threshold population at more than 30,000 adults.
• Patients cured of Hepatitis C — a large and growing population in Portugal after the national direct-acting antiviral programme. The Direcção-Geral da Saúde reported in its 2025 infectious-disease bulletin that Portugal has treated more than 43,000 Hepatitis C cases since 2015, most with sustained virological response, and targets WHO elimination by 2030.
• Diabetic borrowers — the single-largest protected cohort, estimated at more than 1 million adults, many of whom have never qualified for life cover on mortgage products on standard terms.

What Stays Unchanged

The diploma does not create a blanket prohibition on medical questionnaires. Lenders and insurers can still ask about health history within the boundaries of the Código das Sociedades Comerciais, the Regime Jurídico dos Contratos de Seguro (Decreto-Lei n.º 72/2008), the GDPR, and the Lei n.º 58/2019 national data-protection regime. What they can no longer do is penalise a consumer in the covered categories once the waiting period has elapsed.

Other categories of disease — cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric — remain outside the direito-ao-esquecimento perimeter. So does disability that has not been 'mitigated', in the language of the 2021 Act.

How the Reference Grid Works

For oncological disease, DL 79/2026 fixed a staged reference grid running from the end of the therapeutic protocol (cirúrgico, radioterápico ou quimioterápico) and, where present, adjuvant treatment. Once the grid's milestone is reached — a few years for the more favourable protocols and up to ten years in the most conservative ones — the consumer is entitled not to declare the prior condition on the credit/insurance questionnaire.

The inter-ministerial working group that prepared the 2026 diploma (Finanças, Saúde, Banco de Portugal, ASF and the DGS) is expected to publish the analogous grids for HIV, Hepatitis C and Diabetes through a secondary regulation in the weeks after the Diário da República publication.

The operational expectation, flagged by ECO and by the consumer-protection site run by ASF (consumidor.asf.com.pt), is that the HIV and Hepatitis C grids will be tighter than the oncological ones (reflecting the strong clinical evidence on sustained suppression and sustained virological response), while the diabetes grid will be tied to controlled HbA1c and absence of macrovascular complications rather than to a binary “cured” milestone.

Institutions Covered

The 2026 diploma reaches beyond the banks and insurers expressly named in Lei 75/2021. It now binds:

• Instituições de crédito and sociedades financeiras supervised by the Banco de Portugal.
• Insurance and reinsurance undertakings supervised by ASF.
• Insurance distributors — the brokers, agents and tied mediators who run the questionário médico in the field (this was the main gap in the 2021 regime).
• Instituições de pagamento, instituições de moeda electrónica and pension / previdência institutions.
• Mutual insurance societies (sociedades mútuas).

The wider institutional perimeter is the real delivery mechanism. The 2021 law was widely ignored at the broker level because brokers argued they were carriers of the insurer's underwriting, not decision-makers. The 2026 diploma removes that excuse.

Complaints and Enforcement

Consumers who are turned away, over-charged or asked to disclose a covered condition after the waiting period can complain to:

• ASF — for insurance-side breaches, via the Portal do Consumidor de Seguros.
• Banco de Portugal — for banking-side breaches, via the reclamações portal.
• DECO and DECO Proteste — as consumer-rights intermediaries.
• The Centro Nacional de Informação e Arbitragem de Conflitos de Consumo (CNIACC) and the regional consumer-arbitration centres — as alternative dispute resolution.

Sanctions sit on the regime contra-ordenacional in ASF's and the Banco de Portugal's sectoral statutes, rather than on a stand-alone penalty regime inside the direito-ao-esquecimento act. Expect them to be slow, but visible: a single high-profile ASF decision against a named broker will change market behaviour faster than any statute.

Practical Next Steps for Covered Borrowers

1. Pull your complete clinical record from your Centro de Saúde or private hospital — focus on the end-of-treatment date, the pathology reports and, for Hepatitis C, the sustained-virological-response certificate.
2. If you were penalised or refused on an application made within the last five years, keep the insurer's carta de recusa or counter-proposal — those are the evidentiary core of any future ASF complaint.
3. When you next apply, ask the mediator, in writing, whether the questionário médico is being run on direito-ao-esquecimento terms and request a written confirmation that the covered condition is not being asked or scored.
4. If you are mid-credit (already paying) and life insurance is attached, nothing in the new regime forces the insurer to re-price your policy retroactively — you may still need to switch insurer to benefit, and the Livre Escolha de Seguros rules under DL 222/2009 remain the practical lever.

Why This Matters for Expats

Expats sit at the intersection of the two profiles the 2026 diploma was designed to protect. Portuguese language and Portuguese-system unfamiliarity make you an easier target for questionário médico overreach, and the chronic conditions newly covered — HIV, Hepatitis C, diabetes — are disproportionately prevalent among the CPLP migrant cohort that drives the bulk of Portuguese mortgage demand. Retirees on D7-style residency who survived cancer in their country of origin now have a clean Portuguese legal hook for the next home-insurance renewal. Remote-work D8 entrants who are HIV-positive and fully suppressed can negotiate a mortgage without disclosing a condition that would have been a near-automatic rejection four years ago. Diabetic freelancers on recibos verdes, who have been the most under-insured segment of the workforce, get a concrete path to compliant life cover.

The diploma does not re-open old files and does not, by itself, force a cheaper premium. What it does is give every covered borrower a statutory answer to the line “declare all prior conditions” on a Portuguese credit or insurance questionnaire — for the covered categories, for the first time, that answer is no.