The technological revolution that the Portuguese government has been announcing during the past 5 years has some areas that are just advertisement or pure political marketing.

This reality is especially notorious when it comes to the Justice, in which has been introduced two software for the management of the of lawsuits – the CITIUS for the regular Courts and the SITAF for the administrative Courts and what they have in common is the impossibility of checking a lawsuit, as it has always been understood in the civil law system, as a sequence of legal actions and facts.

Both CITIUS and SITAF constrains people to read the same number of pdf files as the amount of documents contained at the lawsuit, which makes impossible to check a bulky bundle of legal documents within reasonable time and, in practice, results on the existence of a printed lawsuits to each party involved in the case, besides the own printing of the Court.

Superior Courts and the Constitutional Court still work with the traditional lawsuits, not using such platforms.

Despite of costing a large sum to the public funds and to the European Union, these software seem, before the eyes of an experienced user, to be something very childish made by inexperienced software engineers or, at least, with a huge lack of knowledge of what is the juridical world.

Notwithstanding, the situation is more serious at the Civil Registration section, in which everything that has been announced as “being ready for work” is full of gaps.

In January 2009, the platform for the Civil Registration – called civilonline – was announced. However, over a year later, it still does not work. Indeed, this is not something especially anomalous if we take into account that, in September 2007, the Decree-Law 324/2007 of 28^th September has reformed the Civil Registration Code and abolished the record books, replacing them by an electronic support called SIRIC, which has only come to be created by the Ordinance nº 1109/2009 of 25^th September, over two years later. That is: the Portuguese Civil Registry was working, during this period, based on a clandestine platform.

This same legislation came to establish the procedure to restore the records if, eventually, the electronic support collapses, under terms that give rises to several suspicions. It would be normal the law, as it is an electronic support, to rule the upload of the data on backup systems. Nonetheless, this is not what happens: the law establishes that the department must verify if there are documents at other departments of the public service that would allow the restoration of the records and, if it is not possible, to ask the collaboration of those whose records have been lost to help with the restoration.

Besides raising the suspicion that there are not safe backup systems, this solution is especially serious because, on the last reform of the Civil Registry, it has been compulsorily established all printed documents to be immediately destroyed, after the record is made or after one year if those documents were not used to make any record.

Considering this framework, in which the Portuguese Law allows the registrations to be processed with electronic documents and also grants them the same authentic status as printed documents since August 1999, the safest way seemed to be to instruct the Civil Registration applications with certified copies, using the electronic communication, with certified digital signature qualified to submit the application before the Register Offices.

Nevertheless, this is not possible at the main office of the Portuguese Civil Registry – the office from Lisbon, which now centres, in just one office, all nine offices that used to exist in the Portuguese capital.

The Portuguese Civil Register Office of Lisbon claims to no have conditions to verify the authenticity of the digital signatures, which is something that has a burlesque flavour, since it stating this over ten years after the systems of the electronic documents and certified digital signature have been established.

Besides it all, the system is completely obscure, once its characteristics and safety platforms are unknown. The old practice of checking the record books to clarify who has been born, passed away or got married in a specific Freguesia and during a specific period of time has become impossible, because the system is closed to the public and only answers to those who ask about an specific record, besides it is circumscribed to a limited territorial zone.

The Portuguese Civil Registry system has, on itself, everything bad that can be pointed when it comes to the application of new technologies, and what should be a factor of progress and has become a factor of retrocession and an open door to fraud.

The most important preventive measure to avoid fraud on Civil Registration matters has always been the transparent nature of the public records, available to everyone, and with the sense of neighbourhood that used to mark all actions, since birth until death. These elements used to make the insertion of a fake record on the old books impossible, because the risk of the fraud to be discovered was huge.

Now, with a closed electronic system that nobody can verify, the door is open to anything that is allowed by imagination on matters of birth, marriage, divorce or death.

During years, the Consulates of Portugal were shown at the press for the worst reasons, as being suspects of monumental frauds. This stage is over with the centralisation of the Passport issuing and the introduction of a modern and sophisticated passport, which has granted credibility to the country in a way that it has never had before.

With an unsafe Civil Registry system and with the authorities allowing, again, a huge number of documents’ dealers to «work» by opening the door to a shameless coexistence with the employees of the Civil Register Office, we fear that we are moving backwards, with losses to all those who hold Portuguese documents.

The most delicate problem of the Portuguese Civil Registry is no longer the Indians with the Portuguese citizenship, because they were born in a territory under the Portuguese administration. It is very important to make clear that the potential problem now is the terrorists.

They are not going to pass so easily in Goa, but they have all conditions to do so in Lisbon.