The Ombudsman, Maria Lúcia Amaral, participated in the annual meeting of the Board of Directors of the IOI-International Ombudsman Institute, held from 10 to 12 May, in New York. As part of the meeting, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the IOI and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), with a view to developing and implementing…
The Ombudsman once again addressed a letter to the Secretary of State for Social Security, drawing attention to the persistence of situations of exclusion from extraordinary social support, decreed in the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic, that generate unjustified social deprotection. The insistence arises after the content of the first warning call, made in May 2021, signalling discrimination against the…
The Ombudsman sent a letter to the Secretary of State for Inclusion of Disabled Persons, in which she notes as positive the approval of Administrative Rule no. 230/2021, of 29 October, nevertheless drawing attention to the persistence of serious situations of social unprotection. The aforementioned Ministerial Order made it possible to render feasible the entitlement to Social Inclusion Benefit (PSI)…
The Ombudsman’s Office sent a letter to the Secretary of State for Social Security in which it questions the restrictive manner in which the Civil Servants Pension Scheme (CGA) is applying the rules of access to early retirement for long contributory careers (46 years). For the purposes of access to this form of early retirement, the CGA has been demanding…
On 2 December, at 12.30 pm, Professor Maria Lúcia da Conceição Abrantes Amaral took up her post as Ombudsman for a second mandate, in a ceremony presided over by the President of the Assembly of the Republic. Under the terms of the provisions established in no. 3 of article 23 of the Constitution, on 19 November, the Assembly of the…
The Ombudsman suggested to a local authority to change its municipal regulations, in the part that requires a qualified digital signature for the delivery of requests, documents and complaints. The suggestion arose from a complaint submitted to the Ombudsman by a person who, not knowing how to use the qualified digital signature, was unable to submit documents to the municipal…
A meeting between the Ombudsmen of Portugal and of Angola, Maria Lúcia Amaral and Florbela Araújo, was held in Lisbon on 12 October, to hold a working meeting and sign a Cooperation Agreement between the two institution The Agreement aims to strengthen the conditions for sharing knowledge, good practices and exchange of experiences, and to facilitate citizens’ access to the…
The Ombudsman submitted a request to the Constitutional Court to review the constitutionality of articles 10, no. 2, 13, no. 4 and 14, no. 1 of Law no. 26/2020 of 21 July. Transposing a European directive, the aforementioned law establishes the obligation to communicate to the Tax and Customs Authority certain internal or cross-border mechanisms with tax relevance.The request addressed…
The Ombudsman has been faced with a growing number of complaints in relation to significant delays in attribution of pre-natal family allowance, as well as in the initial attribution or reassessment of the income bracket of the family allowance for children and young people. In 2020 183 complaints on these issues were received and this year, by the end of…
The Ombudsman’s Office is publishing a small collection entitled “Pandemic Notebooks”, three studies on the extraordinary times we live in. The first focuses on the general topic of education and collects information that was obtained during the first phase of suspension of classroom classes that took place in 2020. The second focuses on homelessness and covers roughly the same period…