The Bill That Would Stop Every AIMA Lawsuit Landing in One Lisbon Court Reached the Floor of Parliament on Wednesday
Proposta de Lei 98/XVII would distribute actions against the migration agency by the claimant's own address, and create specialised immigration divisions inside the administrative courts that already exist. The government counts 152,000 pending cases and a 34 percent resolution rate.
The bill that would stop every lawsuit against Portugal's migration agency landing in the same Lisbon courtroom reached the floor of the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) on Wednesday. Under Proposta de Lei n.º 98/XVII, debated in the generality that afternoon, actions against AIMA, the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo (Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum), would be distributed according to the residence or registered office of whoever is bringing the case, rather than funnelled into the Tribunal Administrativo de Círculo de Lisboa (Lisbon Administrative Circuit Court).
The measure was approved in the Council of Ministers on 23 July as part of a wider package on administrative and fiscal justice. What Wednesday added was the parliamentary stage and one clarification from the Justice Minister, Rita Alarcão Júdice: this does not create new specialised courts. It creates specialised juízos, divisions sitting inside the administrative courts that already exist. The bill was presented alongside her by Gonçalo Matias, Minister Adjunct and for State Reform.
What the new divisions would actually handle
The scope is narrow: cases about the entry, stay, exit and removal of foreign nationals, plus asylum, subsidiary protection and temporary protection, wherever those fall to the administrative courts. The government frames the change partly as adapting the judicial map to obligations arising from the European Pact on Migration and Asylum.
The case for it sits in the government's own numbers. When the package was approved in July, the executive put 152,000 cases pending before first-instance administrative and fiscal courts in 2025, against a resolution rate of just 34 percent. Data from the Direção-Geral da Política de Justiça (Directorate-General for Justice Policy), current to September 2025, showed the number of cases rising 216 percent between 2023 and 2024.
The half of the reform nobody is discussing
Immigration is the headline, but the bill also hands the Conselho Superior dos Tribunais Administrativos e Fiscais (Higher Council of the Administrative and Fiscal Courts) tools it has not had. The council would be able to fix an annual ceiling on how many new cases may be distributed to each judge, and to set reference caseload values for individual courts so that imbalances become visible and correctable. It would also take over scrutiny of income and asset declarations from judges in this jurisdiction.
The standby pool of judges, the quadro complementar, would become more mobile, with judges reassigned to another court or division in the same geographical area where vacancies or backlogs justify it, subject to the judge's consent. Around the edges of the same reform sit four mechanisms designed to keep disputes out of court altogether: a Câmara de Resolução de Litígios da Contratação Pública (Public Procurement Dispute Resolution Chamber) modelled on Spanish and Danish practice, a simplified procedure for administrative claims below 15,000 euros, an administrative route for claiming compensation when the state causes you loss, and specialised arbitration centres.
What it changes for a foreign resident today
Nothing, yet. A first-reading debate is not a law, and the bill sets no date on which a resident of Faro, Braga or Coimbra could file against AIMA at their local administrative court. It is also worth being clear about what specialisation inside existing courts means: the same judiciary, redistributed. Whether that shortens the wait depends on how many judges the system can put in front of these cases, which is precisely the constraint the caseload caps are meant to expose. For anyone whose residence permit, job or family reunification currently rests on a judge ordering the agency to act, Lisbon is still the venue.
