Portugal

Portugal regularly reports information on hate crimes to ODIHR. Portugal's hate crime laws consist of a combination of substantive offences and specific penalty enhancements. The Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor's Office collect data on hate crime.

How hate crime data is collected in Portugal

How hate crime data is collected in Portugal

Entries on all the police forces' incident reporting forms include the legal basis of recorded incidents, the characteristics of the incident, the victims and the perpetrators, as well as information about the time and place of the incident. The database of the Criminal Police already enables the flagging of potential hate crimes and capture bias motivation. There is a Manual for data collection that provides guidance for police officers when registering crimes for statistical purposes (the criminal classification of crimes). All police forces are obliged to fill out crime reports according to the Manual and send these to the Ministry of Justice's statistical department (DSEJI) every month.

The Ministry of Justice is responsible for the centralized collection processes and for producing reliable criminal statistics. Statistics are recorded by police forces, the Public Prosecutors Services and Judicial Courts. The data gathered by the three main police forces (the Criminal Police, the Police of Public Security, and the National Republican Guard) need to be transferred from the processing systems of these entities to the justice statistical information system of the Ministry of Justice. The collection of statistical data on proceedings pending before the courts is fully automated. The data is communicated to the Directorate General for Justice Policy via an automatic interface with Citius, the information system for first instance courts.

Portugal is undertaking efforts to improve their methodology with the aim of producing comparable data, particularly on hate crimes. These efforts include implementing standards set out by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and ODIHR, in particular ensuring that an incident is identified as a potential hate crime in the IT systems of the three main police forces. The Ministry of Justice statistics already allow for a breakdown of the crimes of murder, serious assault/grievous bodily harm, threats, coercion, stalking, forced marriage and its preparatory acts for offences motivated by racial hatred or bias against the victim's skin colour. The need to collect information on other possible bias motivations and on the motivation of other crimes has already been identified and proposed as a possible change to implement in the Citius.

Access more information at the Legislation Online website Legislationline TANDIS Access more information at the Tolerance and Non-Discrimination Information System (TANDIS) website

OFFICIAL DATA

Year Hate crimes recorded by police Prosecuted Sentenced
2019 82 - -
2018 23 58 -
2017 48 Not available Not available
2016 - - 0
2015 Not available Not available Not available
2014 21 21 Not available
2013 Not available Not available Not available
2012 Not available Not available Not available
2011 Not available Not available Not available
2010 Not available Not available Not available
2009 2 0 0

About 2016 Data

    No hate crime data are available. In 2018, the number of sentenced cases was reported.

INCIDENTS REPORTED BY OTHER SOURCES

No information is available.

INTERNATIONAL REPORTS

No information is available.

KEY OBSERVATION

ODIHR observes that Portugal has not reported reliable statistics on hate crimes this year.