Activity Report published today by Attorney General’s Office
Portugal’s Public Prosecutor’s Office ended 2023 with more than 300,000 pending cases, due to the increase in the number of investigations opened last year, according to the activity report published today by the Attorney General’s Office.
The document states that the Public Prosecutor’s Office handled 732,877 inquiries last year, including 480,208 new cases and 252,669 carried over from 2022, which is above the total of 658,349 inquiries handled that year. This represents an increase of 10.4% in new cases opened compared to 435,042 in 2022.
“A total of 428,458 inquiries were concluded, which represents around 58.1% of the total number of inquiries handled in the year, and an increase of 4.3% in the number of inquiries concluded compared to 2022, when 410,808 inquiries were concluded. A total of 304,419 investigations remained pending for the following judicial year,” reads the summary report.
The number of completed investigations was 10.8% lower than the number of new investigations, with the Public Prosecutor’s Office accepting that it had fallen short of its targets: “In 2023, the goal of completing more investigations than the number of incoming investigations has not yet been achieved.”
The report also states that charges were brought in 46,966 investigations, to which must be added 14,397 cases in which a provisional suspension of proceedings was applied, which means that criminal proceedings were brought with indictments in 61,850 investigations. Equally, 316,476 cases were closed.
In 2023, 63,105 cases were sent for trial.
Last year, 48,746 cases were tried, with the Public Prosecutor’s Office achieving total or partial conviction in more than 42,000 trials (around 87%) – leaving just over 6,000 trials that ended in acquittal.
All this is crucial information which the Attorney General will now have when she faces MPs next month, in what will undoubtedly be one of the most high-media-profile-moments of her controversial six-year tenure.
Source material: LUSA
