“This is expected to increase the capacity of services to process nationality processes by 50%”, says the IRN in a statement, highlighting that the new Nationality Platform will “allow the dematerialisation of operations associated with nationality processes, from the entry of the application and respective documents, analysis and final decision”.

With “new functionalities, automation and artificial intelligence”, this new portal will go into operation at the Central Registry Office, in Lisbon, and at the Central Archive of Porto, and should be extended to 16 branches operating in the Civil Registry services throughout the country on 4 November.

In the statement, the Secretary of State for Justice, Maria José Barros, highlighted that “the security in the verification and validation of all elements, the bureaucracy in receiving applications, the multiple manual and redundant tasks, cause bottlenecks in the processing of nationality applications”.

Therefore, the Government hopes “that this new technology will help reduce pending applications, because there is nothing worse than receiving one, having to wait a long time for it”, said the minister.

The new platform allows “documents to be digitised”, extracts “the applicant’s identification data using artificial intelligence” and “automatically classifies the process according to the type of application”, says the IRN.

With this type of automation, the employee “will only have to validate the information uploaded” and the IRN estimates a reduction in the average time from almost two hours to around half an hour.

“In the area of ​​Nationality, the reception of paper documentation is the main source of inefficiencies, adding bureaucratic and logistical burdens and the risk of fraud to the process”, says the IRN.

“In 2022, the IRN received 230,000 applications for Portuguese nationality, the highest number ever”, a process that can be guaranteed “depending on the number of years of legal residence in Portugal”, the nationality of family members, and place of birth, among other reasons.

This project was financed by the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) and had an initial allocation of €1.4 million.

In turn, the president of the IRN, Filomena Rosa, highlighted that the new platform will allow for “more efficient service” and an increase in resource productivity.

The new platform “is integrated with the civil registry system, allowing the birth certificate to be automatically registered with the order granting nationality” and will allow applicants to “monitor the stages of the process online, with greater transparency and clarity”.

In 2023, the IRN created an online channel for submitting nationality applications, exclusive and mandatory for lawyers and solicitors, a resource that has already “been the gateway for more than 53 thousand” applications.

“This measure has contributed to increasing the efficiency of services, reducing the pressure on service and the bureaucratic and logistical burden associated with receiving paper documentation”, the IRN also states.