Portugal's criminal courts start capping witness lists at 20 today
Law 34/2026 changes 32 articles of the Code of Criminal Procedure from 1 September. Prosecutors get a 20-witness ceiling, trials must be listed within two months, and stalling can now cost up to 10,200 euros.
Anyone with a criminal hearing listed this week is walking into a different rulebook from the one that applied on Friday. Law 34/2026 came into force today, rewriting 32 articles of the Code of Criminal Procedure, adding three more, and reaching into the Penal Code and the court-fees regulation as well. Parliament passed it on 12 June and the President signed it on 17 July, but nothing changed until 1 September.
Read the statute rather than the press release and three of the changes stand out, because they will be felt in a courtroom long before the rest.
Witness lists now have a ceiling
Prosecutors can no longer list witnesses without limit. The indictment may name a maximum of 20, and no more than five of those may be called solely to speak to the defendant’s character. The same ceiling of 20 applies to a private prosecutor asking the court to open the investigative phase.
It is not an absolute cap. A reasoned application can go beyond it where the search for the truth requires it, where organised crime is charged, or where the case is one of exceptional complexity. What has flipped is the default. Until today you listed your witnesses and argued about them afterwards; from now on, anyone wanting more than 20 has to say why first.
Trials get a deadline to begin
The rewritten article 312 tells the presiding judge to fix the hearing for the earliest possible date, so that no more than two months pass between the file arriving at the court and the day in the dock. It is the provision that depends most on there being rooms and judges available, which also makes it the easiest one to score a year from now.
Alongside it, the abbreviated procedure has lost the five-year sentencing ceiling that used to confine it. All it needs now is simple and obvious evidence of who did what, whatever the penalty range, and those trials take precedence over ordinary ones.
How much can a Portuguese court fine you for delaying a criminal case?
New article 521-A lets a judge fine a defendant, private prosecutor or civil party between 2 and 100 units of account for manifestly unfounded steps that clog or delay the case. The unit of account is frozen at 102 euros for 2026 under article 242 of the State Budget, so the fine runs from 204 to 10,200 euros. A second such finding in the same case, where the steps were taken through a lawyer, sends a certified copy to the Bar Association for disciplinary review.
Ordinary court fees are up too. Table III now allows up to 12 units for an ordinary trial, up to 12 for an appeal to the Court of Appeal and up to 20 for an appeal to the Supreme Court, which puts the top fee for a Supreme Court appeal at 2,040 euros.
There is also a wholly new article 85-A, which puts the presiding magistrate under a duty to run the case actively and refuse anything dilatory. Decisions taken under that duty cannot be appealed unless they infringe fundamental rights and guarantees, a carve-out the Bar Association calls far too narrow, and which accounts for much of the opposition the law has attracted since July.
It is not the only justice measure starting today. The framework law on criminal policy for 2026-2028 also takes effect on 1 September, and that one sets investigation priorities rather than procedural rules. This is the second time in six weeks that the cost of using the Portuguese courts has moved, after the registry and notary fee increases, and the third piece of summer legislation to bite this month, counting the 180 days the Government has to unblock undivided inheritances. The full text is published in the official gazette.
Image: Paulo JC Nogueira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
