Portugal's new criminal-policy law takes effect on 1 September, with a prosecution team built only for forest fires
Law 35/2026 sets criminal-policy priorities through 2028. It orders the Attorney General to set up a special team to investigate forest arson, staffed by the judicial police, the GNR and the forestry institute, opens forest clearing to prison work, and provides for stop-and-search in areas designated as having socially damaging crime.
In ten days Portugal acquires an investigation team that exists for one crime only, and that crime is setting fire to a forest. It is article 22 of Law 35/2026, the statute fixing criminal-policy priorities for 2026 to 2028, which under its article 29 comes into force on 1 September.
The team is constituted by the Attorney General, after hearing the heads of the bodies involved, and brings together the Polícia Judiciária, the GNR and the forestry and conservation institute ICNF. That combination is the point. Investigators, the force that patrols rural Portugal and the people who actually know the terrain end up in the same room. The next article sets up a second special team, this one for the offence of assisting illegal immigration.
When parliament passed the bill on 12 June, the coverage settled on one detail: prisoners clearing scrubland. It is in there. The text instructs the prison and rehabilitation service to run prison-work programmes covering public-interest activities, among them the clearing, maintenance and improvement of land, scrub and forest, and the recovery of natural spaces and infrastructure damaged by fire. It is also the smallest part of a law that treats fire as a criminal problem from end to end.
What the law requires before anything burns
Forest arson appears on the priority list for prevention and again on the priority list for investigation. The ICNF is required to work with the rural-fire agency AGIF and the civil protection authority on inspection and detection using unmanned aircraft, and to set up reporting and risk-alert lines. For people already convicted of arson, the law provides for reoffending-prevention programmes with supervision measures to be applied specifically during periods of higher fire incidence, which in Portugal means August rather than January.
The figure the law cites for itself is from 2024: 7,778 rural fire incidents, of which 4,758 were the criminal offence of arson. This year the integrated fire-management figures record 6,572 fires and 60,572 hectares burnt up to 18 August, more incidents than in 2025 and far less land.
The clause that will get argued about
One article slipped past most of the coverage and probably should not have. The law provides that the special prevention operations already allowed under the firearms regime shall regularly target zones with socially damaging crime, and may involve identifying and searching people, vehicles and equipment, plus searches of the premises where they are found, where the legal requirements are met.
Who designates a zone as such, the law does not say. It says only that prevention programmes are aimed at those zones, at specific economic sectors, at the destruction of forests and the environment, and at road safety. This, rather than the prisoners, is what split parliament: the final text passed with PSD, Chega, IL and CDS-PP in favour, Livre, PCP and BE against, and PS, PAN and JPP abstaining. It was signed on 17 July and published ten days later.
September will settle the rest. A team that has been constituted is not yet a team that is working, and the law sets the Attorney General no deadline for assembling it.
Photo: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
