The Ombudsman has been faced with a growing number of complaints in relation to significant delays in attribution of pre-natal family allowance, as well as in the initial attribution or reassessment of the income bracket of the family allowance for children and young people. In 2020 183 complaints on these issues were received and this year, by the end of…
The Ombudsman’s Office is publishing a small collection entitled “Pandemic Notebooks”, three studies on the extraordinary times we live in. The first focuses on the general topic of education and collects information that was obtained during the first phase of suspension of classroom classes that took place in 2020. The second focuses on homelessness and covers roughly the same period…
The Ombudsman consulted the Secretary of State for Finance, in order to ascertain the Secretary of State for Finance’s interpretation of the current version of Decree-Law no. 10-J/2020, of 26.03, and received a clarification from him, in line with the Ombudsman’s interpretation, that bank loans to higher education students are included within the scope of the public moratorium. This request…
The Ombudsman received a complaint from DECO, in which this association asked her to complain to the legislator about the elimination of the temporal application norm of Law no. 57/2020, through which the legislator limited the prohibition of certain bank commissions to new contracts. The Ombudsman responded negatively to DECO, in the terms of the letter that can be read…
The Ombudsman sent a letter to the Secretary of State for Social Security, in which she draws attention to the negative impact that the payment of exceptional family support is having on the contribution career of workers who were obliged to resort to this support in order to provide assistance to their children, under the age of 12, due to…
The Ombudsman sent a letter to the Secretary of State for Social Security and to the Deputy Secretary of State and for Fiscal Affairs, in which she requested that efforts be made in order to overcome the situation experienced by companies that have been awaiting, for several months now, attribution of extraordinary support for progressive recovery of activity, wherein the…
The Ombudsman, Maria Lúcia Amaral, will conduct the process with maximum speed to present a proposal for compensation to the family of the Ukrainian citizen Ihor Homeniuk. The Ombudsman’s intervention follows the Resolution of the Council of Ministers approved today, in which the State assumes responsibility for paying compensation to the family of Ihor Homeniuk, who died on 12 March…
The Ombudsman requested the Constitutional Court to abstractly review the constitutionality of the norm contained in no. 5 of article 168-A of Law no. 2/2020, of 31 March, that approved the State Budget for 2020, as amended by Law no. 27-A/2020, of 24 July, that approved the Supplementary State Budget, because it understood that this norm contains unconstitutional restrictions on…
The Ombudsman, Maria Lúcia Amaral, addressed a set of recommendations to the Secretary of State for Consumer Protection, with a view to protecting the rights of consumers, particularly the most vulnerable, in the context of television competitions which call for more expensive telephone calls. In accordance with Article 38 of his Statute, the Ombudsman’s recommendations are addressed to the body…
Following inspections, which confirmed irregular practices that harm citizens’ rights, the Ombudsman sent to the management of Social Security institutes and to the government a set of recommendations aimed at correcting such practices, as well as improving the methods and working conditions in these services responsible for the execution of forced collection processes for debts to Social Security. Motivated by…