More than 500 foreign citizens holding Portuguese golden visas are preparing a collective legal action against the state over the revised Nationality Law, which President António José Seguro promulgated on May 3.
The group, predominantly American but spanning multiple nationalities, organized through WhatsApp and plans to register as a formal association, according to Expresso.
The law, passed 152-64 on April 1 after a deal between the governing Social Democratic Party (PSD) and Chega, doubles the naturalization timeline from five to ten years for most foreign nationals. Citizens of the European Union (EU) and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) member states face a seven-year requirement.
The law contains no formal transitional regime, and the residency clock now starts when the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) issues a residence permit, not when an application is submitted.
Madalena Monteiro, founder of Liberty Legal, noted that current pending residency applications benefit from the existing counting mechanism. For future applications, she maintained, the clock “must count from the day after the public administration fails the decision deadline.”
Multiple law firms represent the affected investors, though most are advising clients to wait for final implementing regulations before filing. One unidentified member of the group told Expresso the investors intend to “exhaust the Portuguese legal system and then assess what legal avenues exist at the European level.”
Beyond the lawsuit, the law is already producing a chilling effect. Existing investors are canceling pending applications, and the legislation is deterring potential new applicants who had planned to invest in Portugal, Expresso reports.
“Legal Stability Must Prevail”
Monteiro, the lawyer who filed a golden visa investors’ amicus curiae brief to the Constitutional Court in December, said the amendment “once again shows that structural rule-of-law matters cannot be handled according to political or media cycles.”
When the legitimate expectations of thousands of people and Portugal’s international credibility are at stake, she argued, “legal stability and the protection of legitimate trust must prevail over rushed solutions.”
Monteiro noted that many affected individuals “simply cannot accept such a significant change to the rules in the middle of the game.”
A number are already seeking to organize legal actions, both collectively and individually, “in the hope that the courts will safeguard their positions and uphold fundamental principles of legal certainty and legitimate expectations.” She confirmed she is “already outlining the legal grounds and structure of the actions to be submitted.”
The Legitimate Expectations Argument
Sara Sousa Rebolo, partner and co-founder of Prime Legal, framed the legal case in terms of what she called the “successive formation of a legal position.”
Residence and nationality are distinct legal realities, she acknowledged, and there is no automatic right to citizenship. But naturalization by residence “must be understood as the outcome of a complex legal process formed over time,” she said. “Legal residence is not peripheral to naturalization; it is its structural prerequisite.”
That successive formation creates, “at the very least, a qualified legitimate expectation deserving legal protection,” Rebolo argued. She pointed to the state’s own conduct as reinforcement: the former SEF website expressly referred to the possibility of acquiring Portuguese nationality through the golden visa residence route.
When the program launched, Rebolo noted, the naturalization period was six years; it was later reduced to five. “It was entirely legitimate for investors to understand that the relevant period for citizenship would correspond to the legal timeframe associated with that residence path,” she said.
State Delays as the Core Problem
Rebolo placed responsibility on AIMA’s administrative backlogs, a problem lawyers have been raising for years. “Many applicants have waited three, four, or five years for SEF/AIMA to act, for reasons attributable not to them, but to lack of resources, institutional support, clear guidance, and administrative capacity,” she observed.
Previous applicants may now need double the years to reach Portuguese citizenship, Rebolo said, when the legal framework in force at the beginning of their process pointed to a five- or six-year horizon.
“It is not legally neutral for the same state to have benefited from the investment, delayed the process, and then sought to shift the consequences of that delay onto individuals by retroactively worsening their path to citizenship,” she argued.
Legal Avenues
Rebolo outlined several paths under consideration: state liability claims for damages arising from the political-legislative function, challenges to the legality and constitutionality of the relevant provisions before national courts, potential review by the Constitutional Court, and recourse to the European Court of Human Rights once domestic remedies are exhausted.
Should the new regime result in some applicants facing effective residence periods exceeding ten years for nationality purposes, she added, questions may also arise regarding compatibility with the European Convention on Nationality.
She cautioned that “this is not a simple or uncontested matter.” Nationality remains a core sovereign prerogative, and the legislature has broad discretion to define the conditions for acquiring citizenship, a point the Constitutional Court recently reaffirmed.
The legal question, she said, “will be whether, in these specific circumstances, that discretion was exercised within constitutional and conventional limits, or whether those limits were exceeded.”
Credibility at Stake
The consequences extend beyond the investors themselves. “The real test is whether Portugal wishes to remain a legally predictable jurisdiction, capable of respecting the trust it creates among those who invest, organize their lives, and make long-term decisions based on the legal framework in force,” Rebolo observed. “If the state can delay procedures for years and then change the rules to the detriment of those affected, the damage will not be limited to these applicants. It will affect the credibility of the Portuguese legal system as a whole.”
“We are talking about families who trusted Portugal,” Rebolo noted, “made significant investments, and structured their long-term ‘Plan B’ around a legal framework promoted and maintained by the Portuguese state.” The widespread sense of frustration and betrayal, she concluded, “is not only understandable; it is legitimate.”
