Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa Voids the Juízo Local Criminal's July 2025 Acquittal in the PAN Email-Blackout Case and Sends Cristina Rodrigues Back to First Instance With a Fundamentação Order on the Evidence Nullity Question

The Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa (TRL, Lisbon Court of Appeal) on Thursday 4 June 2026 annulled the absolvição (acquittal) handed down in July 2025 by the Juízo Local Criminal de Lisboa to Cristina Rodrigues — currently a deputada (deputy) of Chega in the Assembleia da República, formerly a deputada of Pessoas-Animais-Natureza (PAN) — in the criminal case the Portuguese media has labelled the apagão de e-mails do PAN ("PAN email blackout"). The Relação's acórdão (ruling) sent the case back to first instance for a new julgamento (trial), siding with appeals lodged by both the Ministério Público (MP, Public Prosecutor) and PAN itself as assistente (private prosecutor) inside the proceedings.

Rodrigues faces two charges in the original indictment: dano informático (criminal damage to computer data, Article 212 read with Article 6 of the Lei do Cibercrime, Lei 109/2009) and acesso ilegítimo (illegitimate access to a computer system, Article 6 Lei do Cibercrime). Co-defendant Sara Fernandes, a former PAN employee, sits alongside Rodrigues in the indictment and is also subject to the retrial order.

The 2020 facts the MP put to the court

The factual core of the prosecution case runs back to 2020, when Rodrigues was still inscribed as a PAN parliamentary deputy in the XIV Legislatura before her disaffiliation from the party that same year. According to the MP's accusatory statement, Rodrigues and Fernandes — acting, in the prosecutor's framing, "deliberadamente e conscientemente, segundo um plano previamente concertado" ("deliberately and consciously, according to a previously concerted plan") — removed thousands of email messages from PAN-controlled accounts in a sequence the prosecution characterised as designed to prevent the party itself from accessing the message contents. The MP indictment placed the volume at several thousand messages, and the technical scope at multiple email accounts associated with the PAN parliamentary delegation and party organs.

The case was instructed by the Departamento de Investigação e Acção Penal de Lisboa (DIAP-Lisboa) after the party itself filed the original criminal complaint. PAN constituted itself as assistente — the procedural posture that gives a private party the right to file independent appeals against an acquittal — which is the procedural vehicle that produced today's retrial order alongside the MP's own appeal.

The Juízo Local Criminal's July 2025 acquittal

The Juízo Local Criminal de Lisboa absolved Rodrigues and Fernandes in July 2025, finding that the MP and the assistente had not proved the two cibercrime charges to the standard required under the Código de Processo Penal (CPP, Criminal Procedure Code). The first-instance court's reasoning rested in part on a nulidade da prova (evidence-nullity) declaration affecting key elements of the technical record gathered during the investigation — the precise question the Relação has now sent back for re-examination.

The acquittal was, at the time, controversial inside the party — PAN's parliamentary delegation under deputada única Inês de Sousa Real publicly criticised the judgment as failing to address the substance of the deletion claim — and the MP's appeal was filed within the 30-day statutory window under CPP Article 411.

The Relação's grounds for annulment

The Relação's coletivo (judicial panel) ruled the July 2025 judgment null on procedural-rationale grounds: the first-instance decision "não se pronuncia sobre todos os aspectos" ("does not address all aspects") that the parties placed before it, and "não está devidamente fundamentada" ("is not properly substantiated"), with explicit reference to the evidence-nullity declaration and the admissibility treatment of parliamentary documentation. Under CPP Article 379, a sentença that omits required pronouncements or lacks adequate fundamentação is nullity — the appellate court's standard route for sending a matter back to first instance rather than substituting its own judgment on the merits.

Practically, the Relação's order does not pre-determine the outcome of the new trial. A retrial under the annulment route means the first-instance court must reconsider the evidence, the nullity question, and the parliamentary-documentation admissibility ruling, then issue a new judgment that meets the fundamentação standard the Relação imposed. The new judgment is then itself appealable.

The political backdrop

Cristina Rodrigues's procedural posture is unusual: she entered the XIV Legislatura as a PAN deputy in 2019, disaffiliated from PAN in 2020 (the year of the alleged email facts), sat as independent through to the end of the legislature, and re-entered the Assembleia in the XVI Legislatura on the Chega list — where she currently sits as deputada in the Chega parliamentary group. The criminal proceedings have therefore tracked her across two distinct political affiliations, and the assistente that drove today's annulment is her former party, PAN.

The case has been politically sensitive because it touches the broader question of party-asset and party-document control during deputy disaffiliation cycles — an issue that recurs across the smaller parliamentary forces in the Portuguese system, where party email infrastructure is often co-administered with deputy staffs.

What happens next

The case now returns to the Juízo Local Criminal de Lisboa for a fresh first-instance trial. No date has yet been set; under CPP Article 312, the new despacho de designação de dia para julgamento (scheduling order) will issue once the case file completes its return to the first-instance distribuição, typically a 4-8 week administrative window. A second acquittal would itself be appealable, and a conviction would carry the cibercrime sentencing range under Lei 109/2009 — prison terms of up to three years for the dano informático charge, and up to one year for the acesso ilegítimo charge, with both convertible to fine under Article 70 of the Código Penal at the court's discretion.

The Chega parliamentary group has not, as of mid-afternoon Lisbon time, issued a comment on the Relação's ruling. Rodrigues herself has consistently denied the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment.

Sources: Observador (4 June 2026); Público (4 June 2026); RTP (4 June 2026); Lei do Cibercrime (Lei 109/2009); Código de Processo Penal Articles 379 and 411.