The Government Builds a 30-Day Chamber for Public-Contract Disputes and an Out-of-Court Route to Claim From the State
Thursday's Council of Ministers approved a chamber to settle public-contract disputes in about 30 days, plus an administrative route to claim compensation for state-caused physical harm within a year — without going to court. Justice Minister Rita Alarcão Júdice announced the reform.
Businesses locked in disputes over public tenders, and citizens seeking redress for harm caused by the state, are meant to spend far less time in court under a package of justice measures the government approved on Thursday. The reform of administrative and fiscal justice, taken to the Conselho de Ministros (Council of Ministers) under the banner of “speed and simplicity,” tries to keep whole classes of dispute out of the courtroom altogether — and it goes well beyond the immigration-court changes in the same package.
The centrepiece for the economy is a new Câmara de Resolução de Litígios de Contratação Pública (Public Procurement Dispute Resolution Chamber), designed to settle disagreements over public contracts in roughly 30 days. Fights over the award and execution of state tenders are a notorious source of delay in Portugal, capable of freezing infrastructure projects for months or years while appeals grind through the administrative courts. By channelling those disputes into a dedicated body with a tight deadline, the government hopes contractors and public bodies can resolve their differences before they ever reach a judge.
The second novelty matters more to ordinary people. The reform creates an administrative route to claim compensation for the state’s extra-contractual civil liability — the legal category that covers physical harm caused by public activity — without going to court. A citizen injured as a result of state action would be able to seek an indemnity within a one-year window, provided the state agrees to the claim, sparing both sides a lawsuit that today can drag on for years before any money changes hands.
“The idea is to accelerate and simplify the action of justice,” the government said in presenting the measures, which were announced by the Justice Minister, Rita Alarcão Júdice. The logic running through the package is consistent: reduce the number of cases that reach the courts in the first place, so that the ones that do can be heard faster.
The same Council of Ministers approved the more widely reported half of the reform — the creation of judicial sections specialised in immigration and international protection, and an end to the concentration in Lisbon of lawsuits against the migration agency AIMA, which will now be spread across courts by the claimant’s place of residence. Together, the contracts chamber, the out-of-court compensation route and the immigration changes are pitched as a single answer to a problem Brussels underlined only last week, when it found that administrative cases in Portugal now take an average of 861 days to decide.
As with any Council of Ministers approval, the measures are a starting point rather than a finish line. Several strands must still pass through the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) and be built out across the court and administrative networks, and the government has not attached firm dates to when the new chamber will open or the compensation procedure will accept its first claim. But the direction is unambiguous: on public contracts and on claims against the state, the government wants the default answer to be a fast administrative process, with the courtroom reserved for the cases that genuinely need a judge.
