Judicial Reforms ‘Under Pressure’: The New Map/Organisation of the Portuguese Judicial System

The geographies of justice in Portugal: redefining the judiciary's territories

“…49 Second, this administrative unit is no longer used in other public territorial templates (like health care) and therefore considered anachronistic (Gaspar, 2015), thus going against the reasoning invoked by the former minister of justice above. Furthermore, as Dias and Gomes (2018) highlight, this disconnect between territorial templates further reinforces the distance between populations and territories.…”

“…'My colleagues tell me that sometimes people call to talk to the prosecutor to file a credit claim, and when they realize that they have to go to Montemor, and they live in Oliveira do Hospital, or in Lousã, and there is no transport or they have to use a taxi at their own expense … they decide not to go.' 53 As this last excerpt emphasises, the professionals have reported examples of abnormal court locations and displeased users (Dias and Gomes, 2018). This means that, in spite of the gains in efficiency and timeliness as shown by the official statistics mentioned earlier and corroborated by the interviewees, the new territorial template has constrained access to the courts, making them geographically distant.…”

“…As Dias and Gomes (2018) have asserted, one of the most important and challenging reforms of the judicial system of the last decade was prepared, approved and implemented in a short period of time, without a full implementation plan and the necessary emergency measures to tackle the problems that have arisen, precisely because it was vital to have the reform implemented before the MoU expired, as otherwise the financial support would be affected.…”

“…The secrecy of the negotiations and the fact that the reform process was planned by the ministry without presenting relevant information to support its agenda (Moury and Standring, 2017; Dias and Gomes, 2018) gave rise to great discontent and demonstrations 39 by local authorities and populations before the implementation of the reform in 2014, by means of public protests, precautionary measures and popular actions called by the municipalities against the closure of the courts. These demonstrations were later channelled by the main opposition parties in their electoral programmes during the legislative election campaign in 2015 and the reopening of the closed courts was seen as a necessary measure for the readjustment of the judicial map.…”

“…This is all based on the idea that the justice system suffers from a deficit of organisation and management structures, causing a lot of waste and making it imperative to adopt measures aimed at changing working methods (for more effective human and material resource management) and procedural flows (Santos, 2014a). This has had significant implications, especially a need to reconceptualise the reform of the judicial institution in a context of financial austerity (Dias and Gomes, 2018).…”