Portugal's return law was signed on 31 August. What happens next turns on a 160-page ruling
President Seguro promulgated the decree overhauling reception, entry, removal and asylum rules three days after the Constitutional Court cleared it. The court also set out how the text must be read, and that reading now guides judges and officials.
It is signed. António José Seguro put his name to the decree on 31 August, the one that rewrites how foreign nationals and stateless people are received in temporary detention centres, how they enter, stay, leave or are removed from the country, and how asylum is granted. Three days passed between the Constitutional Court’s ruling and the signature.
The route here is on the record. The President had sent the text for preventive review on 7 August with doubts on two fronts: whether the best interests of the child were protected, and whether it was proportionate to hold foreign citizens who had committed no crime for as long as the law allows, on an administrative decision alone. Reform in this area is desirable, he said at the time, but it has to be done with legal certainty and in line with the Constitution and Portugal’s international commitments. The court then cleared all eleven provisions put in front of it, unanimously, in a ruling its own president put at more than 160 pages.
What the court added to the text
This is the part that matters if you live here without a Portuguese passport, and it is why the President ended up signing. According to the statement from Belem, the court did not simply wave the provisions through. It resolved the interpretive doubts in terms meant to guide courts and administrative authorities, on exactly the points the President had raised: the expulsion of children born in Portugal, the possibility of separating parents from children, and the removal of people entitled to international protection.
So the decree travels with an official reading attached. Anyone who later challenges a specific removal decision will not be arguing about the article alone. They will be arguing about the article plus what the ruling said the article can and cannot mean. It is the same lesson that catches people out in family reunification, where the written rule is not the whole rule.
What is still to come
After promulgation come publication in the official gazette and entry into force on whatever terms the text itself sets. Only then do the immigration agency, the administrative courts and the police start working from the new rules, and only then does anyone find out how well the court’s criteria hold up against a real case.
Until that happens, the practical advice is the dull kind that keeps working. Keep every document, date every submission, and do not let a permit lapse on the assumption that the old law still covers you. A transition is precisely when a missed deadline costs the most.
Photo: Andrzej Otrębski / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
