NOW you tell me. I could have had all that for the bargain price of a cannabis vape pen and a plane ticket.
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I believe you may be confusing the application of the law which is definitely not a case-by-case in Portugal vs. decisions by a judge on individual lawsuit cases which is indeed case-by-case and does not rely on precedents (at least not directly).
I did make two assumptions: 1) that the regulations will be ambiguous enough to invite discrepancies in application (by its terms, I think the law only requires wait time to be “considered,” and 2) that disputing any resulting unfavorable applications will have to be done by resorting to a court process.
But in practice it is for things like processing times. The law stipulates reasonable processing times for the GV process, but the only way to enforce it is paying for a lawsuit, which is just buying a lottery ticket to maybe enforce the law (your judge might say no). Luckily since there’s no concept of precedent you can just keep buying lottery tickets (lawsuits) until one wins (you get a judge that says yes).
It’s effectively a pay-to-play lottery based legal system.
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The most surprising part is that more and more people are coming even knowing beforehand that legal system is pay-to-play based 
If things are much better out there, I wonder why immigrations (both from portuguese speaking countries and non-portuguese speaking countries) in Portugal are not decreasing at all. In fact it is the opposite!
When you close the sluice gate the water backs up.
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…and then there is
“The years starts whenever the person doing the 5 year calculation when they review your application”
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Do you know someone who got his citizenship recently through this program? Do we know when did the clock start ticking? I did my biometrics in Jan 2023 and still no news on my residency card.
GOYA & read …
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People are getting citizenship via GV and I know at least 5 people who received their citizenship that way, but of course as the process now takes about 2 years after applying for naturalization, they all based application on the old law and their time count started from the date of the first permit.
6th of June now… anybody seen any official regulations* published for the new Nationality law yet?
*no PT GV immigration consultant spin please. We’ve already had lots of that.
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“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” - Douglas Adams
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Are there any updates on the new law and how/if it clarifies when the clock starts?
I’m bumping this as well, anyone heard anything?
Still no sign of any clarifying regulations, and no indication they’re on the way. The government is already past the legal deadline for producing them, but there’s no real penalty for that. At least one lawyer thinks we’ll never see any regs on this, and the matter will be settled by practice (or the courts).
No yet. They have 90 days to produce regulation. It is not time yet. If weekends are excluded, then 90 days will be in September/October.
I recall being told by a lawyer that in the case of legislative timescales like this, it’s just calendar days, not business days. (Unlike the deadlines within which AIMA is supposed to act.)
90 business days from 5th March would be 16 July …?
New law comes into effect from 1st April. I am not sure when we should count for 90 days. From 5th March or from 1st April? No matter how we count, for sure government will continue disrespect their own written law as they always do. It is fact!
Per the law, it was 90 days from publication in the Diario, which was 5th March
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