Lisbon, Oct. 29, 2025 (Lusa) - The administrative and tax courts say that ‘chaos has ensued’ as a result of the magistrates' new computer system, with cases, including urgent ones, being lost by computer and others being sent to the wrong judges, access being unduly withdrawn, and trials being postponed.
At the request of the Superior Council of Administrative and Tax Courts (CSTAF), an emergency meeting will be held on Wednesday morning with the Secretary of State for Justice, Ana Luísa Machado, who until she was called to join the new government, presided over the Institute for Financial Management and Equipment of Justice (IGFEJ), under the Ministry of Justice and responsible for the courts' computer systems.
At Wednesday's meeting, which will be attended by the presidents of the administrative and tax courts of first and second instance, CSTAF will demand a total resolution of the problem by next week or, failing that, the immediate suspension of the computer system migration process, the reactivation of the jurisdiction's previous system, ‘the old SITAF’, and a gradual advance in the migration process, with the creation of a pilot project with just one court.
The problems are shared by the Public Prosecutor's Office and the administrative and tax judiciary, both of which complain of difficulties and constraints that prevent the normal functioning of the courts and the processing of cases in compliance with the new law, since the previous computer system was switched off on the 20th of this month.
Since the 20th, the courts have had a single computer system for processing cases, with the IGFEJ migrating from the previous system for administrative and tax courts, SITAF, to Citius.
Despite the migration to a single system, access is via different interfaces, depending on the user's procedural status: public prosecutors use MPCODEX, and judges use MAGISTRATUS.
In both cases, nothing is working as it should, the prosecutor of the Administrative and Fiscal Court of Viseu and treasurer of the national board of the Union of Public Prosecutors (SMMP) Susana Moura, and the secretary judge of the Superior Council of Administrative and Fiscal Courts (CSTAF), judge Eliana de Almeida Pinto, told Lusa.
Cases lost in the migration process, which have been slowly being recovered for a week now, loss of access to consult their own cases and those of colleagues, lawyers excluded from cases, the impossibility of entering procedural documents into the system, requests for lawyers to submit paper cases to the court offices, contrary to the law, loss of computer tools in the new system that are essential for carrying out their duties are some examples of the new day-to-day life in this jurisdiction since the migration of systems.
"Chaos has ensued. We have no security in what we're doing," prosecutor Susana Moura told Lusa, criticising the IGFEJ's lack of response and the process of reporting failure after failure without anything actually being resolved.
Eliana Pinto, for her part, said that in April, when the migration was announced, CSTAF ‘diligently decided to set up a task force to monitor the process’ with the IGFEJ. Several meetings took place, and tests were carried out, which apparently showed no flaws in the migration, but these were verified.
"Apparently, everything was safeguarded, we pointed out that there were procedures specific to the jurisdiction that had to be taken care of in the new computer system. Absolute chaos has ensued in the jurisdiction. Some cases have disappeared, there are cases from the Supreme Administrative Court (STA) that have ended up in courts of first instance," said the judge.
According to Eliana Pinto, the South Central Administrative Court has announced that trial sessions scheduled for Thursday will not take place due to constraints.
The head of CSTAF also pointed out that the thousands of cases relating to the regularisation of migrants in Portugal, the so-called AIMA cases (Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) appear in the system assigned to the wrong section, which if not corrected in the computer system could mean that the judges in that section have to produce an order for each one of them, referring them to the correct section and judge.
‘There are 140,000 orders, that's impractical,’ said Eliana Pinto.
She also denounced the situation in which CSTAF finds itself in fulfilling its mission of supervising and monitoring the activity of the courts in its jurisdiction, because it has no access to the system and is therefore prevented from doing so.
Recalling that the State is a defendant in administrative and tax cases, Eliana Pinto pointed out that a constitutional body, the CSTAF, is prevented from carrying out its mission due to a computer failure on the part of a body supervised by the Ministry of Justice, i.e. the government, jeopardising the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.
IMA/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
