Bringing a child to Portugal through family reunification? They have to be here on the day you file
AIMA set a criterion in August for its Family Reunification of Minors platform: the child must be demonstrably on Portuguese territory on the date the application is submitted. If they are still abroad, the portal will not take it and the application has to be made in person.
If you are in Portugal and want to bring a child over through family reunification, one thing changed this month that can undo your planning: AIMA now requires the child to be demonstrably on Portuguese territory on the date the application is filed through its Family Reunification of Minors platform. It is set out in AIMA’s own information note on family reunification.
In practice, you cannot submit an online application for a child who is still in Brazil, or India, or anywhere else. At this stage the portal only covers under-18s who are already physically here.
Which applications does this affect?
The European route, which is the more generous of the two that exist. It applies when the person doing the reuniting is a national of an EU member state — Portuguese nationals included — and is governed by Law 37/2006, which brought the EU free-movement directive into Portuguese law. What comes out at the end is not an ordinary residence permit but a Residence Card for a Family Member of an EU Citizen.
The other route, the general one, sits under the Foreigners Act and applies to foreign residents. There the new law tightened the clock, requiring two years of legal residence before you can apply — with one important carve-out, in that the waiting period does not apply to minor children or dependants unable to care for themselves.
Mixing up the two is the expensive mistake here: it changes the law, the document list and the card you end up holding. Read how reunification actually works before you open the portal.
What if the child is still abroad?
You are not stuck, you are on a different track. The application has to be made in person, at an AIMA office, by the person in Portugal who holds the right to reunification. AIMA then notifies the foreign ministry, which handles the consular visa the child travels on.
It is slower and it needs an appointment, but it is the procedure designed for that situation — and it is exactly why the new criterion matters. Bringing the child over before filing has stopped being a convenience and become a condition of using the portal at all.
What to have ready
Documents issued outside Portugal need a Hague apostille and a Portuguese translation. The full birth certificate is the central piece, because it proves the link to the EU-citizen parent, and it usually expires a year after issue. Check that date. An out-of-date certificate sends the whole thing back to the start.
Add the EU citizen’s valid ID, the child’s passport, proof the person reuniting lives here and, if the other parent does not, a certified authorisation or a custody decision. Incomplete paperwork is the number one reason these files sit for months. Fees are in AIMA’s table.
One last note that saves a lot of people a lot of time: if the child is entitled to Portuguese nationality by descent, there may be no reunification to do at all. Once nationality is recognised they are an EU citizen in their own right, with no family member’s card and no renewals.
Photo: Rakoon / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
