The Ministry of Justice is aiming to hire 400 additional staff for Portugal’s struggling courts if its proposal as part of the 2017 State Budget is accepted by parliament.
The Union of Judicial Employees says that "it is better than nothing", while warning that this is not enough to end the staffing problems the court system is experiencing.
The Justice Minister, Francisca Van Dunem, managed to get the staffing request included in the draft state budget presented today in Parliament.
According to the preliminary version of the proposal, the government plans to hire 400 employees and at the same time intends to promote an equal number of staff who currently are at the bottom of the career category.
These 400 staff members will be promoted and the places they leave vacant will be filled by new employees. The lack of trained staff has been one of the biggest problems in the court system, a fact noted by the unions, the Attorney General's Office and the Supreme Judicial Council.
"It's good news," admits Fernando Jorge, president of the Judicial Officers Union. "It's better than nothing. But it is not the ideal measure. We were counting on hiring 600 to 800 new employees. The working number of court employees should be 7,500 and currently there only are about 6,300 employees in post."
The budget also contains a proposal to strengthening the judicial service by bringing judges out of retirement in an attempt to handle the backlog of cases which currently forces many to wait years before their cases are listed.
