Text: Priscila S. Nazareth Ferreira
It took thousands of cases to overcrowd the Lisbon Circle Administrative Court. It was necessary to reach the unsustainable, as is the situation we find ourselves in today, with more than 100,000 processes distributed in front of the Agency for Integration, Migrations and Asylum (AIMA), so that the obvious inefficiency of the Portuguese State could reach the pages of the newspaper in a disconcerting scenario.
The “artificial” litigation, as classified by the Union of Portuguese Judges, revealed something that this lawyer, along with many other peers, has always said: the perverse transfer of responsibility.
Immigrants litigate against the State in search of a simple agenda. This activity, in any other country in the European Union (EU), can be easily achieved in a matter of minutes.
But it is necessary to manufacture a crisis, it is necessary to make procedures archaic, to justify the unjustifiable. Otherwise, the political discourse that “criminalizes” immigration would not take shape, and with that the Government would also not be able to “steal” votes from the extreme right, which has precisely advanced in Portugal by blaming immigration for all the problems the country faces.
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It is always necessary to define a culprit, even if the true guilt is lying on a silver spoon, rejoicing in the faces of the truly innocent. This same transfer of responsibility has a high cost for the same Portuguese who complain about immigration.
Although only immigrants need AIMA, the courts have a universal demand, access to which is not defined by the citizen’s origin. Therefore, with the “collapse” of the system due to excessive actions, judges are no longer available to deal with the infinity of processes that nature cannot be reduced to a simple scheduling.
After all, Portuguese society would like to recognize that the state pays high salaries to a group of people whose only activity in the last two years has been dealing with AIMA’s delays. Meanwhile, employees who occupy the most basic positions in the public service refuse to do what they are responsible for: providing service to citizens.
This inversion is not even mentioned. But it’s high time it stopped being ignored: is it a magistrate’s job to deal with a residence scheduling request from a simple immigrant? For the Portuguese Government it seems so…
Blessed time when the Magistrates’ Union rises up against this nonsense. Blessed hour when the appeal of a group of thousands of lawyers is heard. Blessed is the hour when absurdity was finally not normalized.
I confess that I had already lost hope. But today I see them renewed. I can still sleep and wake up with the certainty that the voice of reason is still heard in the Judiciary.
Therefore, we hope that the Ministry of the Presidency responsible for the AIMA portfolio will present a worthy response. Stop inflaming a crisis, and act with the expected honesty: disclose the amounts collected from the fees paid by immigrants, the amount spent on extra workers and logistics. And how much was not invested in improving work precisely to create the crisis scenario:
They limited territorial jurisdiction;
They closed the scheduling portal for almost all types of residence;
They failed to issue the titles within the deadline set by law;
They made copious errors in document analysis;
And finally they prevented the regrouping.
And all this without considering the impact of these errors on other sectors of Public Administration. In the face of facts there are no arguments. That judges know how to recognize all the facts and apply justice to those who need it: the immigrant.
*Priscila S. Nazareth Ferreira is a Private International Law lawyer working on immigration.