Online Citizenship applications by the end of 2022
The Government recently announced that the Justice Portal - www.justica.gov.pt - will provide services for incorporating companies, performing remote authentication acts and submitting Citizenship requests by the end of this year.
Since its creation five years ago, the Justice Portal integrates several services and information, with emphasis on passport requests and the scheduling or renewal of the Citizen's Card. Besides these, one of the most sought-after is the progress of the Citizenship application. According to the Secretary of State for Justice, Pedro Tavares, the Government "wants to allow the submission of online requests, involving a pre-assessment of the documents submitted by an applicant, which will take a great deal of pressure off the in-person services".
Granting PT Citizenship is currently one of the services in the Institute of Registration and Notary Affairs (IRN) that suffers from the biggest backlog, with processing times exceeding ten times the periods defined by law. This delay was attributed to the "exponential increase in the number of nationality requests" in recent years.
The Secretary of State for Justice also explained that "in the current context and due to the volume of requests for Portuguese Citizenship", the Government's immediate measures are to integrate the option for the online submission of these requests, as long as the applicant submits the needed documents in the platform.
Pedro Tavares also referred that "a large part of the administrative work related to registration is associated to the actual reception and validation of the documents. In order to relieve the pressure of personal attendance when applying for Citizenship, we will make the online submission of applications available on the Justice Platform".
