Key figures — as of 2026-09-22: Draft law 98/XVII, debated in Parliament on 16 September 2026, would end the Lisbon Administrative Court's exclusive jurisdiction over AIMA lawsuits, redirecting filings to the court covering the claimant's home address or registered office — pending AIMA-related cases stood above 128,000 through May 2026 after climbing from roughly 50,000 in mid-2025 — a 28-judge task force cleared 22,436 cases (about 18% of the backlog) between April and June 2026 — an almost identical decentralisation bill was rejected by Parliament in February 2026.
What the bill actually changes
Anyone who has sued AIMA to force an interview date, a residence card, or a decision on a renewal knows the drill: no matter where you live in Portugal, your case lands at the Tribunal Administrativo de Círculo de Lisboa (TACL). That single-court rule is what draft law 98/XVII, debated in the Assembleia da República on 16 September 2026, is designed to end. The cases would instead be distributed according to the home address or registered office of the person or organisation taking legal action. At present, cases involving the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) are concentrated at the Lisbon Administrative Court.
Importantly, this isn't about building new courthouses. The Government does not plan to create separate immigration courts; instead, specialised sections would be set up within courts that already exist. Those specialised sections would handle immigration and asylum matters specifically — dealing with cases concerning the entry, residence and departure of foreign citizens, as well as removal proceedings, and administrative cases involving asylum, subsidiary protection and temporary protection. Justice Minister Rita Alarcão Júdice has framed this as a way to build judicial expertise rather than create a constitutionally shaky parallel court system, and the bill also gives the Superior Council of Administrative and Tax Courts (CSTAF) new powers to cap how many cases any one judge can carry and to shift judges between courts when backlogs pile up unevenly. Portugal's network of first-instance administrative courts spans well beyond Lisbon — Braga, Porto, Coimbra, Aveiro, Leiria, Sintra, Almada, Beja and several other cities — so the redistribution has genuine geographic reach.
Why Lisbon became the bottleneck
The scale of the problem explains the urgency. Pending AIMA-related cases at Lisbon's Tribunal Administrativo do Círculo climbed from roughly 50,000 in mid-2025 to over 133,000 by October 2025, and remained above 128,000 through May 2026. Brussels has noticed too: the case clearance rate fell to 48% in 2024, while the average time required to reach a decision increased to 861 days—almost two years and five months. Portugal is also now bound by an EU deadline that makes the backlog politically harder to ignore — a 90-day limit on residence and work-permit decisions took effect in May 2026 under an EU directive, adding pressure from Brussels on top of pressure from the courts.
A stopgap has already been tried. A group of 28 judges started work in early April on the roughly 124,000 pending immigrant cases against AIMA, and in three months the task force resolved 22,436 cases, recovering about one-fifth of the pending backlog. That's real progress, but it still leaves the vast majority of filings sitting in the same queue.
The political back-story
This isn't the government's first attempt — it's the second. The Assembly of the Republic had already rejected a bill from Iniciativa Liberal to remove the concentration of AIMA cases in the Lisbon Administrative Court, due to the high number of pending cases, back in February 2026. That earlier bill had received an unfavourable opinion from CSTAF over the risk of spreading the problem nationwide, and was opposed by PSD and CDS-PP — the very parties that support the current government's own, near-identical proposal. The optics are awkward, but the government has now built the decentralisation measure into a broader justice-reform package, which appears to have shifted the political calculus.
Not everyone is convinced this fixes the real problem. The Union of Migration Technicians has argued that mass litigation stems from AIMA itself issuing decisions that are, in the union's words, "late, poorly prepared and legally fragile", and that redistributing cases treats the symptom rather than the cause.
GrowIN's analysis: what this could mean for your case
Here's the number worth sitting with. Portugal's administrative-court network includes roughly fifteen first-instance courts capable of handling this workload once specialised sections are set up. If the current backlog were spread proportionally rather than dumped entirely on one bench, the average court would be looking at somewhere around 8,000–9,000 cases instead of Lisbon alone absorbing all 128,000-plus. That's not a guarantee of faster rulings for any individual claimant — case complexity and local judge availability still matter — but it's the structural reason smaller courts could plausibly move faster once the law takes effect.
What to watch next
The bill still needs further parliamentary votes before it becomes law, and no implementation date has been set. Given the February precedent, passage isn't guaranteed even with government backing. For now, anyone with a pending AIMA case, or considering an intimação to force action on a stalled residence application, should keep filing through the existing route via AIMA's own channels (aima.gov.pt) and track the bill's progress before assuming a local-court option exists. Our visas hub tracks how AIMA processing timelines and court remedies interact for residence permit applicants.
GrowIN Portugal Editorial: A law built to unclog one courtroom in Lisbon could end up deciding how fast tens of thousands of foreigners across the country get their day in court.
This remains a live legislative process, not a done deal — GrowIN will update this piece once the bill clears its next parliamentary hurdle.