bySebastian Leitner, AT
The second study visit in 2024 brought the ICANEPO project to even two cities, Porto & Lisbon. On 22 May 2025 the project members were received at the District Court of Porto, which is the central competent court for the European Payment Order in Portugal. The participants visited the court room of the District Court in the Palace of Justice of Porto, where practitioners dealing with the EPO explained how they are handling the cases and demonstrated the workflow on site.
This was followed by a discussion based on the ICANEPO questionnaire. The national case management system CITIUS is also used for EPO cases. The workflow is still partly paper-based but migration to fully electronic files is ongoing. Communication with lawyers is done electronically. While the EPO forms are implemented in the CMS, only the Portuguese language version is available, so practitioners normally use the e-Justice Portal for the other language versions and then add the completed form to the system.Unless the claimant stated otherwise, the court automatically transfers cases to other courts to continue the national procedure. An express request from the claimant is not necessary.
Case numbers for the EPO procedure are modest (~300/year, although there have been years with around 600 cases), especially when compared with the ~30 000 cases for the national payment order. Practitioners often prefer to use the better-known national procedure and then seek its enforcement around Europe instead of the less known EPO procedure.
The visit was concluded by a guided tour through the building of the palace of Justice, which included valuable insights on the transition of the Portuguese judiciary from one serving a dictatorship (the building dates from the Salazar era) to one becoming an independent check of the now democratic government. It included also a nice view over Porto and the river. After an excellent lunch with local cuisine by the river Douro, the participants travelled with the “Alfa Pendular” high-speed-train to Lisbon, which also allowed to have some views of the Portuguese countryside.
On the next day the project members were received at the Judicial High Council where the two case management systems used by the Portuguese judiciary, the over 20 years-old CITIUS and the newer MAGISTRATUS (since 2022), were presented. The demonstration of both CMS showed well how the more modern system can further improve the workflows within a court. It is more user-friendly with many customizable views and it has many functions designed for fully electronic files, such as internal notes. New functions are still being rolled out which will allow to replace CITIUS in the future. For EPO it is planned to include the forms in all languages and allow electronic case filing for citizens .
District Court of Porto