It will be no surprise for those who are sitting around waiting for their cases to be heard in court, that Portugal has the highest rate of congestion in civil proceedings in the European Union.
The ratio between the number of cases pending at the beginning of a year and the number of cases concluded in that year show that in 2015, the rate in Portugal was 214%, according to data compiled by Pordata Europe.
The nation’s courts are clogged, with Portugal’s problem way ahead of the second most inefficient in Europe, Greece, which has a ‘congestion rate’ of only 105%.
In Poland and Lithuania the percentage is less than 20%.
Pordata rather weakly points out that in the last four years this percentage has been 'decreasing in Portugal,' little comfort for those left twisting in the wind.
As of December 31, 2016, there were 1,136,292 court cases pending. Four years earlier, there were more than 1.6 million but some of the reduction has been effected by a justice minister wiping out many cases which she decided would yield no satisfaction to the plaintif.
The government points to the Citius computerised court case management system, the increase in court staff, the reopening of some courts that had been mothballed during the hair-brained closure programme of the often sober Justice Minister, Paula Teixeira da Cruz - all positive moves but clearly not even starting to address the problem.
Most of the cases that are waiting to be heard are related to debt collection procedures which are blocking non-debt civil cases where those involved can wait four or more years even to have their case scheduled for its first hearing.
As for prison overcrowding, Pordata shows that Portugal’s prison system is at 112% occupancy, against 127% in Hungary at the top of the table, and 49% in Luxembourg at the bottom.
The data also showed that in 2015, in most European countries there was a high percentage of foreigners among the total number of prisoners.
In Portugal, for example, 17% of inmates are foreign in a country where the percentage of foreign residents represents about 4% of the population.
Portugal’s shameful attempt at a modern justice system can not simply be blamed on a lack of magistrates as Portugal has 17 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half of those registered in Croatia, Slovenia and Luxembourg, but much higher than in France and Ireland, whose value is less than 10 per 100,000.
Successive governments have done as little as politically possible to review this mess and to take decisive and inspired action on behalf of those many citizens for whom, ‘justice delayed, is justice denied.’