Portugal's return law clears the Constitutional Court, all eleven questions rejected
The seven judges who signed the ruling were unanimous: not one of the eleven provisions is unconstitutional. The President had sent the decree up on 7 August, and every objection fell.
Portugal’s Constitutional Court ruled on Friday that there is nothing unconstitutional in the law on asylum, detention and the return of foreign nationals. Not one of the eleven provisions put in front of it. The seven judges who signed ruling 736/2026 were unanimous.
The answer is quick to state and slow to read: the ruling runs to more than 160 pages, according to the court’s president, João Carlos Loureiro.
What did President Seguro ask the Constitutional Court?
António José Seguro sent the decree for preventive review on 7 August, three weeks after parliament passed it on 17 July with PSD, IL and CDS in favour, Chega abstaining and the left voting against. His objections are set out plainly in the referral he signed and sent to the court: as he read it, some of the solutions raised well-founded doubts about the best interests of the child, particularly where they allow parents to be separated from their children, or allow Portuguese-national minors to be expelled indirectly along with a parent.
We covered the referral the day it was made, and the question hanging over the three weeks since was simply how many of the eleven would survive.
All of them.
What the law lets the state do
This is the part that matters if you live here without a Portuguese passport. In certain circumstances the decree allows the expulsion of foreign nationals who have children holding Portuguese nationality, the expulsion of children under five born in Portugal, and the detention of foreign nationals beyond 180 days, renewable, where there is a lack of cooperation or delay in obtaining the necessary paperwork.
The court did not say any of that was wise. It said the text carries relevant safeguards for the best interests of the child, and that on those grounds it would not rule the provisions unconstitutional.
A new bench, straight into the deep end
This was the first decision since the court was reshaped, with four new judges sworn in on 15 June and a new president on 24 June. When we wrote about the change of bench, the obvious comparison was 2025, when the court struck down five of the seven provisions it examined in the nationality law. This time it was eleven provisions, no strikes, and nobody dissenting.
What happens now
With no unconstitutionality declared, the decree goes back to the President, who decides whether to sign it into law. The ruling itself will be published, and that is where the reasoning becomes visible: 160 pages is a lot of argument, and it is the text anyone challenging an individual deportation in court will be reading first.
Photo: Esquerda.Net / Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
