What the Government Approved
In late July 2026 the Portuguese government approved a legislative proposal to create courts specialised in immigration and international protection, as part of a broader administrative and tax justice reform. The measure is a direct response to the volume of lawsuits filed against AIMA, and its central purpose is to move those cases through the justice system faster than the current generalist administrative courts can. As The Portugal News reported, the government presented the proposal as a way "to ease the caseload of lawsuits against AIMA."
The most important thing to understand up front is that this is a proposal, not a law in force. The next step is debate and a vote in parliament, and only after it passes and is published in the Diário da República would any of it take effect. That distinction matters because it determines what you should do right now: nothing about the current process for suing AIMA has changed on the strength of this announcement, and any plan that depends on the new courts existing is premature. Treat this as a signal of where the system is heading, not as a change you can rely on today.
That said, the direction of travel is clear and consistent with reforms already moving through the system. It sits alongside the earlier change that allows AIMA lawsuits to be filed in the applicant's local administrative court rather than exclusively in Lisbon. Read together, the two measures point to a deliberate strategy: take the pressure off the Lisbon Administrative Court, spread immigration litigation across the country, and put it in front of judges who handle these cases routinely.
Why It Exists: 133,000 Pending Injunctions
The reform exists because the courts are drowning in AIMA cases. The Justice Minister, Rita Alarcão Júdice, pointed to a sharp rise in administrative-court backlogs after 2023 — the year the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF) was abolished and replaced by AIMA. The headline figure: as of April 2026 there were roughly 133,000 pending injunctions to protect rights, liberties and guarantees. That is the standard legal instrument foreign nationals use to force AIMA to decide a residence or asylum case within the legal timeframe, and 133,000 of them sitting unresolved is the scale of the problem the specialised courts are meant to address.
To see why that number is so large, it helps to understand the dynamic that produces it. When AIMA fails to schedule an appointment or issue a decision within its legal deadline, the affected person's practical remedy is to go to court. The court then orders AIMA to act by a set date. Because AIMA's operational delays have been systemic rather than exceptional, this remedy has become routine — tens of thousands of people have used it, turning what was designed as an exceptional safeguard into a mass workaround for administrative paralysis. The litigation is a symptom of AIMA's inability to keep pace, expressed through the one lever applicants actually control.
For an individual applicant, the backlog is not an abstraction. A congested Lisbon Administrative Court means longer waits for a hearing on your injunction, which means AIMA is compelled to act later, which means your residence card or decision arrives later. Anything that reduces court congestion — whether by redistributing cases geographically or by dedicating specialised judges to them — has a direct line to how quickly your own case can be forced to a conclusion. That is why a justice-system reform, which can sound remote, is worth the attention of anyone currently stuck in the AIMA queue.
The Two Concrete Changes
The proposal contains two concrete mechanisms. The first is a venue change: lawsuits against AIMA would be filed in the administrative court covering the area where the applicant resides or is based, rather than being funnelled through the exclusive jurisdiction of the Lisbon Administrative Court. In practice this redistributes cases across the country's courts, so a resident of Porto, Faro, or Braga would litigate closer to home rather than adding to the Lisbon pile. This is the same principle as the local-jurisdiction reform already in motion, now reinforced within the specialised-courts package.
The second is specialisation: immigration and international protection cases would be handled by judges specialised in that field rather than by generalist administrative judges who also handle tax, procurement, and every other category of administrative dispute. The theory is that judges who see immigration injunctions daily can process them faster and more consistently — they know the recurring fact patterns (AIMA silence past the legal deadline, missed appointments, unprocessed renewals) and the settled remedies, so each case requires less time to get up to speed. Consistency also helps applicants and their lawyers predict outcomes, which can reduce unnecessary filings and appeals.
Neither mechanism changes the substance of your legal claim. The injunction itself — the intimação para proteção de direitos, liberdades e garantias — remains the vehicle, and the legal test (has AIMA exceeded its lawful deadline to act?) is unchanged. What changes is where the case is heard and by whom, and therefore how quickly it can realistically be resolved. If you want the underlying mechanics of the action itself, our guide to filing a lawsuit against AIMA walks through how an injunction is built and filed.
What It Means If You Are Suing AIMA
If you are already litigating against AIMA, the immediate answer is that your case proceeds under the current rules — the specialised courts do not yet exist. Your pending injunction is not paused, reassigned, or affected by the July announcement. Continue to work with your lawyer on the timeline the current court gives you. If the reform passes later, transitional provisions would determine whether in-flight cases move to the new courts; that detail will only be knowable once the enacted text is published, and it is not something to plan around now.
If you are deciding whether to sue, the reform changes the strategic picture only modestly. The venue question is the practical one: depending on where your case falls, the local-filing rule may already be available to you through the jurisdiction reform that is further along than the specialised-courts package. That can mean filing in your regional administrative court today rather than in Lisbon — a real, present-tense advantage, separate from the specialised-courts proposal. Ask your lawyer specifically which court your injunction should be filed in under the rules as they stand this month, because the answer may already have shifted in your favour.
What the reform does not do is give you a reason to delay. The value of an injunction comes from starting the clock that forces AIMA to act; every week you wait is a week AIMA is not under a court order. Because the specialised courts have no enactment date and would take time to become operational even after a parliamentary vote, betting on them is a bet on an uncertain future date against the certain cost of continued AIMA silence. For most people whose case is already past AIMA's legal deadline, the calculus favours acting under the system that works now.
File Now or Wait? A Decision Framework
The honest framework is short. File now if your AIMA case is already past its legal deadline and the delay is causing concrete harm — you cannot travel, cannot prove residence to an employer or bank, or your family reunification is stalled. In that situation the injunction is the tool that exists today, it works today, and waiting for specialised courts trades a certain remedy for a speculative one. The reform does not make today's injunction any weaker; it only promises to make future ones faster to hear.
Consider waiting only in narrow circumstances: if your case is not yet past AIMA's lawful deadline (in which case an injunction may be premature regardless of the courts), or if a lawyer advises that a specific procedural change already in force materially improves your filing position if you hold off a short, defined period. Even then, "wait" should mean a matter of weeks tied to a concrete event — not an open-ended hope that the specialised courts arrive. An indefinite wait for a proposal that has not passed parliament is the weakest position of all, because it combines ongoing AIMA silence with no legal pressure applied.
The cleanest way to resolve the question is to separate the two decisions. Decision one: is my case ripe for an injunction (past AIMA's deadline, causing harm)? If yes, that alone usually justifies filing. Decision two: given where I live and the current jurisdiction rules, which court do I file in? That is where the reforms bite — and it is a question about venue, not about whether to act at all. Keeping the two apart stops the promise of a better court tomorrow from talking you out of the remedy available today.
The Criticism: Courts Do Not Fix AIMA
The proposal has drawn pointed criticism, and it is worth taking seriously because it bears on whether the reform will actually help. The union representing migration workers argued that the judicial delays stem mainly from AIMA's own operational problems — that the agency's delays and legally unsound decisions create the litigation in the first place, and that adding specialised judges does nothing to fix the lack of resources, organisation, and career prospects for the workers inside AIMA who are supposed to decide cases before they ever reach a court. In this view, the reform treats the symptom, not the disease.
The critique is structurally correct: a faster court cannot substitute for a functioning agency. If AIMA continues to miss its deadlines at scale, specialised courts will simply process a high volume of injunctions more efficiently — a better bottleneck, but still a system where the normal route to a decision runs through a lawsuit. The genuine fix is upstream, in AIMA's capacity to decide residence, renewal, and asylum cases within the legal timeframe without a court order. Measures like the task force that cleared roughly 20% of the court backlog and AIMA's operational modernisation matter more to the root problem than the venue of the litigation does.
For you as an applicant, the practical implication is to hold both ideas at once. The specialised courts, if enacted, could genuinely speed up the litigation route — good news if you have to sue. But they are not a reason to expect AIMA itself to suddenly decide your case without pressure, and they are not a substitute for taking action on a file that is already past its deadline. The rational stance is to use the legal tools that exist now, watch the reform as it moves through parliament, and keep your expectations anchored to the fact that the underlying delays are an AIMA capacity problem the courts can relieve but not cure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has Portugal created specialised immigration courts yet?
Not yet. In late July 2026 the government approved a proposal to create them as part of a wider justice reform, but a proposal is not a law. It must still be debated and voted in parliament and published in the Diário da República before it takes effect. Until then, the current administrative-court system applies and nothing about filing an AIMA lawsuit has changed.
What would the reform change for someone suing AIMA?
Two things: it would let you file in the administrative court where you live instead of only in Lisbon, and it would put immigration and asylum cases before specialised judges rather than generalist ones. The aim is to spread the caseload and speed up injunctions that force AIMA to decide.
Should I wait for the specialised courts before suing AIMA?
Usually no. The proposal has no enactment date and must still pass parliament, while your delayed case keeps costing you. The injunction that forces AIMA to act already works today. Waiting for an uncertain future reform rarely beats filing now — but confirm your current filing venue with a lawyer, as the local-filing rule may already help you.
How many AIMA lawsuits are pending?
As of April 2026 there were roughly 133,000 pending injunctions to protect rights, liberties and guarantees against AIMA — the backlog that built up after SEF was replaced by AIMA in 2023 and that the specialised-courts reform is designed to relieve.
Will specialised courts fix the underlying AIMA delays?
Not by themselves. Critics, including the migration workers' union, argue the litigation exists because AIMA's operational problems cause delays and flawed decisions, and that specialised judges do not fix AIMA's staffing and resourcing gaps. Faster courts relieve the symptom; only a functioning AIMA fixes the cause.