The Short Answer: Sue AIMA Where You Live, Not Just Lisbon
On 28 July 2026 the Portuguese government approved a legislative proposal that would let lawsuits against AIMA be filed in the administrative court of the area where the applicant lives, ending the Lisbon Administrative Court's role as the single funnel for these cases. The same package would create courts specialised in immigration and international protection. The reason is blunt: a single court in the capital has absorbed the near-totality of legal actions against Portugal's immigration agency, and it can no longer keep up. Reported by The Portugal News and Portugal Resident, the measure is part of a broader administrative and tax justice reform steered by Justice Minister Rita Alarcão Júdice.
For foreign nationals stuck in AIMA's backlog, this matters because the court action most of them rely on — the intimação para a prática de ato devido, which asks a judge to order AIMA to decide a case it has left past its legal deadline — has itself become slow, precisely because everyone has been filing in the same overloaded Lisbon court. Spreading these cases across regional administrative courts is meant to shorten the wait for a decision. It is important to be precise, though: this is a proposal that has just been approved by the executive, not a law already in force. What follows sets out what the proposal changes, why the numbers forced it, and how it should — and should not — affect your own decision if you are considering suing AIMA.
If you are already deciding whether to file, the practical headline is that venue is a lever you can pull now, independent of this reform. Territorial-jurisdiction rules already point many applicants to the administrative court of their own residence rather than to Lisbon by default. The reform would harden and generalise that logic, but the underlying idea — do not reflexively sue in Lisbon — is something you can act on today with the right legal advice.
What the 28 July 2026 Proposal Actually Says
The proposal has two core components. First, it removes the exclusive jurisdiction of the Lisbon Administrative Court (Tribunal Administrativo de Círculo de Lisboa) over lawsuits against AIMA and provides that such actions be filed in the court of the area where the applicant resides or is based, redistributing the caseload across administrative courts nationwide. Second, it establishes courts specialised in immigration and international protection, so that these highly repetitive, high-volume cases are handled by dedicated judges rather than competing for time with the full range of administrative and tax litigation. The government frames both as parts of a wider reform of administrative and tax justice, not as a one-off immigration fix.
The target of the reform is specific: the urgent injunction-type actions that dominate AIMA litigation. The Justice Ministry pointed to the accumulation in the capital of mass-filed, repetitive lawsuits seeking the protection of rights, freedoms and guarantees — in plain terms, thousands of near-identical intimações filed by people whose residence-permit applications AIMA never decided on time. Because these cases are procedurally similar and turn on the same failure (AIMA missing its deadline), they lend themselves to being distributed and standardised across specialised courts, which is exactly what the proposal tries to enable.
Not everyone accepts that this addresses the real problem. The Union of Migration Technicians (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores da Migração) has argued that the system's sluggishness stems primarily from AIMA's own operational limitations, internal organisation and lack of resources, and that merely decentralising cases to local courts does not stop new lawsuits from being generated in the first place. That critique is worth keeping in view: moving cases to different courtrooms changes where the queue forms, not necessarily why it forms. The reform is aimed at the symptom — congestion in one court — more than at the cause, which is AIMA deciding cases late.
Why Now: 133,000 Suits Buried in One Court
The scale of the problem explains the urgency. When SEF was abolished and its administrative functions passed to AIMA in 2023, lawsuits against the new agency concentrated overwhelmingly in the Lisbon Administrative Court. By mid-2026 that court was carrying on the order of 130,000 pending processes tied to AIMA — reporting put the figure at 130,946 processes pending, of which 129,239 were intimações — and the broader count of AIMA-related suits flooding the capital's administrative court has been reported at around 133,000 (The Portugal Post). Almost all of these cases are the same instrument — an order compelling AIMA to decide — filed by different people against the same defendant.
The government's first response was a judicial task force rather than a jurisdiction change. A group of 28 judges began working through the backlog in April 2026, when the total stood at about 124,000 cases, and within three months had resolved roughly 18% of the immigrant lawsuits against AIMA (The Portugal News). That progress is real, but it also shows the limits of throwing judges at a single court: clearing a fifth of a six-figure backlog in a quarter, while new intimações keep arriving, is not a path to a healthy docket. The jurisdiction reform is the structural follow-up to a task force that, on its own, cannot outrun the inflow.
For the individual applicant, these numbers are not abstract. A backlog of this size is why an intimação filed reflexively in Lisbon can take many months to reach a decision, even though the legal question — did AIMA miss its deadline? — is usually simple. The reform exists because the venue, not the merits, has become the bottleneck. Understanding that is the key to using it, or the current rules, to your advantage.
What It Means If You Are Weighing an Intimação
The intimação para a prática de ato devido remains the main court remedy for a stalled AIMA case, and the reform does not change what it is or when you can use it — only where you file it. Under Lei 23/2007, AIMA is generally expected to decide a residence-permit application within 90 days; when it blows through that deadline and leaves you in limbo, an administrative court can order it to act. The action is classified as urgent, which is why it can, in a functioning court, move faster than ordinary litigation. The problem in 2026 has not been the legal tool; it has been that the tool was being fed into a single congested court.
The reform's promise, if enacted, is that your case would be heard by an administrative court in your own region — and, over time, by judges specialised in immigration — rather than joining a six-figure queue in Lisbon. For someone in Porto, Braga, Coimbra, Faro or the islands, that could mean a materially shorter path to a decision, because regional dockets are lighter and specialised judges handle these repetitive cases more efficiently. It also has practical side benefits: filing and following a case near where you live is cheaper and simpler than instructing a Lisbon-based firm to litigate in the capital on your behalf.
None of this changes the threshold decision of whether to sue at all. An intimação makes sense when AIMA has genuinely exceeded its legal deadline and the delay is causing concrete harm — you cannot travel, cannot start a job, cannot open a bank account or access services because your status is unresolved. It is less useful where your case is simply progressing slowly but within time, or where the real issue is a missing document you can still supply. Before filing anywhere, confirm that your case actually qualifies and that the delay is legally actionable; our practical guide to filing a lawsuit against AIMA walks through when the remedy fits and what the process involves.
You May Already Be Able to File Locally
One of the most important practical points is that you do not necessarily have to wait for this reform to sue outside Lisbon. The Estatuto dos Tribunais Administrativos e Fiscais (ETAF) already assigns territorial jurisdiction over administrative cases against State bodies to the Tribunal Administrativo e Fiscal of the applicant's place of residence in many situations. In other words, an applicant living in Cascais may properly file at TAF de Sintra, one in Almada at TAF de Almada, and one in Vila Nova de Gaia at TAF do Porto — not automatically at TAF de Lisboa. This rule is widely under-used, largely because Lisbon-based law firms default to the Lisbon court out of habit and convenience.
That existing option is why some applicants and lawyers were already reporting faster resolutions from regional courts well before the July 2026 proposal. Where Lisbon intimações against AIMA were running many months, several regional administrative courts were closing comparable cases considerably faster, because their dockets were not carrying the AIMA overload. The July reform would generalise and entrench this pattern, but it did not invent it — the venue advantage exists in current law for a large share of applicants. We cover exactly how this works, including the courts reported to be clearing cases fastest and the cost expectations, in our dedicated piece on filing an AIMA court injunction outside Lisbon TAF.
The takeaway is a sequencing point. If your case is urgent, the right question today is not "should I wait for the reform?" but "which court can I properly file in right now, and is it faster than Lisbon?" A specialist lawyer can confirm the correct venue for your residence and case type. Acting under the current ETAF rules can capture much of the benefit the reform is trying to deliver, without gambling on when — or in what final form — the legislative change lands.
Legal Status: A Proposal, Not Yet Law
It is essential to be clear about where this stands. As of late July 2026, the government has approved a legislative proposal — it has not enacted a law. In Portugal's system, a proposal of this kind still has to complete its legislative path, which can involve parliamentary passage, promulgation and publication before it enters into force, and its provisions can be amended along the way. Treating an approved proposal as if it were already the binding rule is a mistake that can cost you: until the change is in force, the exclusive-Lisbon framework and the existing ETAF jurisdiction rules remain the law that governs where you file.
There is also genuine uncertainty about impact, not just timing. Even supporters concede the reform reshapes where cases are heard rather than reducing how many are filed, and the migration technicians' union warns that without fixing AIMA's own capacity, decentralisation risks simply spreading the backlog across more courts. The optimistic case is that specialised immigration judges and regional distribution will process these repetitive intimações much faster; the pessimistic case is that the same volume of late AIMA decisions keeps generating the same volume of lawsuits, now in a dozen courtrooms instead of one. The honest position is that the reform is promising but unproven.
For anyone navigating a stalled case, the practical stance is to watch the reform without waiting for it. Keep evidence of AIMA's delay and its concrete effects on your life; confirm whether you can already file in your local administrative court under current rules; and make the decision to sue based on your situation today, not on a rule that may take months to finalise. If AIMA is deciding your case late and it is hurting you, the tools to act already exist — the reform, if it passes, will make those tools work better, but it is not a reason to pause an urgent case. For related context on how the courts have been coping, see our update on the judicial task force that cleared 20% of the AIMA backlog.
Frequently Asked Questions
See the Q&A panel above for direct answers on whether you can now sue AIMA in your local court, what an intimação para a prática de ato devido is, why the government is moving these cases out of Lisbon, whether the reform will make your case faster, and whether you should wait for it before filing. The short version: the 28 July 2026 proposal would let you sue AIMA where you live and create specialised immigration courts, but it is not yet law — and under existing rules many applicants can already file outside Lisbon today, which is often the faster and safer move for an urgent case.