Portugal's asylum and deportation law goes to the Constitutional Court (and children are the sticking point)
President Seguro asked for a preventive review of the decree rewriting entry, stay and removal of foreigners, plus the asylum regime. He flagged 11 rules, and the court has 25 days.
Portugal’s new foreigners law is on hold. On the afternoon of Friday 7 August, President António José Seguro sent the parliamentary decree to the Constitutional Court — the one rewriting how foreigners enter, stay, leave and are removed from the country, and rewriting the asylum regime alongside it. Until the judges rule, nothing gets signed into law.
The request runs to 34 pages and names 11 provisions whose constitutionality the President disputes. The note published on the Presidency’s own site puts the reasoning plainly: reform here is desirable, but it has to come with legal certainty and respect for the Constitution and for the treaties Portugal has signed, from the European Convention on Human Rights to the Refugee Convention. The court has 25 days.
Most of the objections are about children
This is where the request bites hardest. Seguro questions the expulsion of foreign parents whose Portuguese minor children live in Portugal, on the grounds that it may cut across the right to family unity and the best interests of the child. He also questions whether foreign children under five who were born on Portuguese soil can lawfully be removed by force, which runs straight into the citizenship rules for children born in Portugal.
A third objection sits in the same family: holding child applicants for international protection, unaccompanied minors included, in temporary installation centres.
The other problem is an appeal that no longer pauses anything
The second set of doubts is procedural, and the practical effect is blunt. Under the decree, appeals against unfavourable administrative decisions on asylum and subsidiary protection stop being suspensive and become merely devolutive. In plain terms, someone could be removed from the country before a court has had the final word on their case. The President’s view is that this risks hollowing out effective judicial protection. On the same list sits the extension of administrative detention of foreigners to as long as 180 days.
The decree passed with PSD, CDS and Iniciativa Liberal voting in favour. Chega abstained and the entire left voted against. This trip is becoming routine: every one of this government’s migration reforms has so far gone from parliament to Belém and on to the Palácio Ratton, first under Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and now under Seguro.
If you already live in Portugal with a case in progress, nothing changes this week. The current rules keep applying until there is a ruling, and anyone who was banking on the new framework to bring relatives over after the changes to family reunification has a few more weeks of waiting. The judgment, when it lands, is published in the case law section of the Constitutional Court.
Image: SIC / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0) · file photo, January 2025
