End of the CPLP request in the national territory
What never happened in a fully administrative way has come to an end: being a citizen of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP), entering the country with a tourist visa and, subsequently, applying for a residence permit. THE Government never regulated this measure in practicebeing applied only through legal actions, cThere are thousands of cases pending in the courts or waiting to be scheduled by AIMA.
The CPLP residence permit remains — the agreement is multilateral — but, according to the new law, the request can only be made if the immigrant has entered the country with a previous residence visa. This excludes the tourist visa, that is, the 90-day entry permit for tourism from countries like Brazil, for example.
Initially, the Government was willing to allow the request for a CPLP title in national territory, but backed away. According to minister António Leitão Amaro, this modality could become a “expression of interest light”, in reference to the old mechanism extinguished by Luís Montenegro.
This change relating to the CPLP is a specific measure to reduce the entry of immigrants into national territory — the same applies to the change in the work search visa.
Limited family reunification
There are also changes to the request for family reunification, which, in practice, could contribute to a reduction in the number of immigrants entering. This is because some couples will have to remain separated for two years. This is the case for couples without children — it will be necessary to prove 15 months of legal residence in Portugal to be entitled to the request. In addition to these 15 months, there is a waiting period of up to nine months for AIMA to respond.
If the couple has minor children, the request can be made immediately, as is the case with highly qualified visa holders and golden visas. In other words, the higher social classes continue to benefit from the right to immediately reunify their families, and the Constitutional Court did not consider this change to be unconstitutional.
The Government argues that, in practice, this two-year period already exists. The aim will be to give “real expectations” to immigrants. Currently, more than 24 thousand requests for family reunification are stuck at AIMA.
Stop legal actions
With around 133 thousand legal actions against AIMA and rising for more than a year, the Government wants to stop this flood of processes, caused by the agency’s administrative inefficiency — recognized by the Executive itself. THE Judicial appeal has become the alternative for almost everything: renewals, family reunification, first residence permit, everything that should have administrative vacancies at AIMA.
With the new text of the law, the immigrant will have to demonstrate that the lack of response from AIMA “compromises, in a demonstrably serious and direct way, the timely exercise of rights, freedoms and personal guarantees, the protection of which cannot be effectively ensured through available precautionary means”.
Furthermore, the new legislation provides the possibility for the administrative judge to take into account the situation of AIMA’s human and material resources to authorize, for example, a scheduling. In other words, it may deny a request due to the agency’s lack of capacity to respond. THE DN/DN Brazil knows that this provision aims to “correct abuses of urgent judicial protection”.
amanda.lima@dn.pt