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

The Ministry of Justice is responsible for the centralized process of the collection of crime data and for producing national justice statistics. The data that feed the 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) are transferred from the processing systems of these entities to the justice statistical information system of the Ministry of Justice. To that effect, 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. There is a Manual for data collection that provides guidance for police officers when registering crimes for statistical purposes. 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 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.
The Ministry of Justice's statistics present data based on the following indicators: cases reported, criminal cases in the trial phase closed in the first instance judicial courts, and defendants and persons convicted of these crimes. The statistics already allow for a breakdown of the crimes of murder, serious assault/grievous bodily harm, threats, coercion, stalking, and forced marriage and its preparatory acts, motivated by racial hatred or bias against the victim's skin colour.
Portugal is undertaking efforts to improve their methodology with the aim of producing comparable and more disaggregated data on hate crimes, in line with the standards set out by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights and ODIHR.

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
2020 132 Not available Not available
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 2018 Data

    The number of cases recorded by the police refers to incidents in which the newly introduced marker "hate crimes" has been added in the recording process. The judiciary has data on the crimes of murder and grievous bodily harm aggravated by bias; however, these cannot be reported as their number does not exceed three.

National developments

The possibility to flag a hate crime case has been introduced in the Criminal Police database.

INCIDENTS REPORTED BY OTHER SOURCES

Racist and xenophobic hate crime

Date Type of incident Source Description
2018-06 Violent attacks against people
OSCE Office for Democratic Institution and Human Rights
 Show info

INTERNATIONAL REPORTS

No information is available.

KEY OBSERVATION

ODIHR observes that the law enforcement agencies of Portugal have not recorded the bias motivations of hate crimes.