There are more than 420,000 applications for Portuguese citizenship stuck at the IRN, say lawyers
Two months ago, the Institute of Registries and Notaries changed its procedures for analyzing applications for granting Portuguese nationality. But not even artificial intelligence is speeding up the evaluation.
A little over two months ago, the Institute of Registries and Notaries (IRN) announced changes to the systems for analyzing and monitoring applications for Portuguese citizenship. The promise was that, with everything digitalized and with the help of articial intelligence (AI), the processes would move forward at a faster pace. What we are seeing, however, are structural problems that not even technology can solve. The IRN lacks the essential thing for its service to move forward: more sta. Without this, it will be dicult to process the more than 420,000 nationality applications that are stuck, according to a survey by two of the most respected companies specializing in immigration: Start! Be Global and Martins Castro. “
By law, citizenship applications should be processed within a maximum of 90 days, but there are applications from March 2021 still being analyzed by the Lisbon Registry Oce,” says lawyer Renato Martins, from the consulting rm Martins Castro. “Not even the priorities provided for in the legislation, the children of Portuguese minors, are being respected,” adds Flávio Peron, CEO of Start! Be Global. Applications that used to take six months to obtain a nal decision now drag on for a year. In the case of adult children, the analysis time has gone from eight months to almost two years.
Head of Operations at Start! Be Global, Ema Oliveira has no doubts: “The number of applications for Portuguese citizenship has snowballed. Nothing will be resolved any time soon, despite the help of articial intelligence.” There is only one reason for the skepticism: technology helps at the beginning of the process, which is entirely digital, by rst screening the documents submitted. However, when the work is carried out by IRN employees, everything stalls. “Today, there are only 32 notaries in the whole of Portugal. There has been no public competition for the institute for over 20 years,” adds Renato Martins.
According to experts, the situation worsened after the government created a series of facilities for applying for Portuguese nationality. In 2015, a change in the Organic Law reduced the time required to reside in Portugal to obtain Portuguese citizenship: from six to ve years. In 2020, there was another change in the Organic Law, this time reducing the obstacles to granting citizenship to descendants of Portuguese citizens, such as grandchildren. They no longer needed to prove emotional ties to Portugal and gained the right to grant nationality for two generations ahead.
“All of this was done without the IRN’s infrastructure being prepared to meet the growing demand,” says lawyer Bruno Gutman. “We have a limping system that not even articial intelligence can x,” he says. He believes it is unfair that people have to wait so long to have access to a right provided for by law. According to Ema Oliveira, there is also a problem within the IRN in interpreting the law. “Depending on the employee who assists us, issues are resolved more quickly or new barriers arise,” he emphasizes.
Brazilians, experts point out, are by far the ones who have applied for Portuguese citizenship the most. A survey by the Ministry of Justice shows that, between 2010 and 2023, more than 400 thousand nationalities were granted to Brazilians. When asked by PÚBLICO Brasil about more recent gures, the IRN did not comment. But it is certain that, since last year, the pressure exerted by Brazilians on the agency responsible for evaluating citizenship applications has increased. This is because the current migratory ow of citizens from Brazil to Portugal has increased since 2017. Therefore, each year, thousands of Brazilians complete the ve years of residence in Portuguese territory required to apply for the benet.
According to Flávio Peron, given this reality of migration to Portugal and the facilities granted by the government, the institutions responsible for applications for Portuguese citizenship should have been prepared. There is no point in having laws — which are good — to attract descendants of Portuguese citizens and even other foreigners, if the conditions are not created for the State to respond promptly to requests. “I want to believe that the deadlines for resolving cases will decrease. With the new IRN program, lawyers directly upload scanned documents to the system, a process that, until now, was done by the institute's employees,” he says.
While agility is still in the realm of expectations, Ema Oliveira points out, there are hundreds of thousands of people frustrated by the IRN's delay in fullling its role, according to current legislation. The worst part, adds Renato Martins, is that, even after waiting all this time, people have no guarantee that their requests will be met. “In other words, time and money are wasted and everything is uncertain,” he says. “There is no reason for all this delay,” adds Bruno Gutman.