Lisbon, April 14, 2025 (Lusa) - Portugal's justice ombudsman has decided not to send a request from the Liberal Initiative (IL) party to the country's Constitutional Court to assess the legality or otherwise of legislation to reverse a merger of parish councils implemented more than a decade ago, according to a ruling to which Lusa had access on Monday.
"Notwithstanding the relevance of the question posed, we conclude that it is not justified to raise with the Constitutional Court the illegalities identified in the complaint," states the ombudsman, Maria Lúcia Amaral, in ruling sent to the IL as complainant.
On 18 March, the party had asked the ombudsman to request that the Constitutional Court carry out an abstract review of the legality of breaking up 135 unions of parishes to restore 302, so reversing the process by which these entitites were aggregated during an administrative reform carried out in 2013.
The IL's main argument is based on the Legal Regime for the Creation, Modification and Extinction of Parishes (Law 39/2021), a framework law that the IL considers to be "of reinforced value" in this respect.
According to the party, article 15 of this law prevents changes to the parish map in the six months prior to any national elections, so the law that disaggregates 302 parishes would be illegal, given that snap legislative elections have been scheduled for 18 May.
However, the office of the justice ombudsman said that it did not find "sufficient reason for the illegalities invoked", for the "simple but decisive reason" that it was "deeply convinced" that these time restrictions "only apply to elections to local authority bodies" - in other words that "it only makes sense" that the article in question (15, number 1) prohibits changes to the parish map in the six months prior to "elections to local authority bodies."
Among the reasons cited by Amaral are the fact that paragraph 2 of the same article states that, when there are mid-term elections, the ban on changing the parish map in the previous six months "only covers the creation of parishes that are involved in that electoral act.
"However, the so-called mid-term elections only take place for local authority bodies, since the Electoral Law for the Assembly of the Republic never uses the term," she stressed.
In her decision, the ombudsman also notes that the territory of local authorities "only delimits the constituencies for elections to their respective bodies" - unlike the situation with legislative elections, "in which the constituencies are district-based" - and that parish bodies "do not have the power to organise elections to the Assembly of the Republic [Portugal's national parliament], unlike, it should be noted, municipal bodies.
"It is therefore clear that any political-legislative decision aimed at reorganising parishes will only have an immediate and direct impact on elections to local authority bodies," the text goes on. "Elections to the Assembly of the Republic will fall outside this scope.
Amaral concludes that she saw “no grounds for asking the Constitutional Court to declare the disaggregation of parishes illegal.”
The disaggregation of parishes was waved through by parliament on 17 January (with the IL being the only party voting against this in parliament) and was given final approval by the assembly on 6 March, with IL and the hard-right Chega party both voting against.
The law was promulgated on 12 March and published the following day, before Portugal's president had heard his Council of State on whether he should dissolve the parliament following the fall of the central government, and call snap elections.
Parliament was formally dissolved on 20 March, with the elections scheduled for 18 May.
The IL had previously announced that it would fight the process of reversing the 2013 parish reforms "in two ways: one political and one legal."
The re-establishment of these parishes is the result of a special, transitional mechanism provided for in the legal rules for the creation of parishes, which makes it possible for parishes that were aggregated during the 2013 administrative reform to be re-created.
The 2013 administrative reform saw 1,168 parishes in mainland Portugal disappear, reducing the number from 4,260 to the current 3,092, as part of cost-saving measure introduced as part of the programme negotiated with the 'troika' of institutions overseeing Portugal's euro-zone bailout at the time due to the country's debt crisis.
RCS/ARO // ARO.
Lusa
