Portugal · Lei de Acesso aos Documentos Administrativos
Ten working days is not long. Run LADA on a clock that knows it.
For Portuguese public bodies, autarquias, and institutes — AccessPoint computes the 10-working-day response, applies the Lei 26/2016 grounds, and tracks queixas to the CADA and on to the administrative courts.
Portugal — LADA at a glance
- Response deadline
- 10 working days
- Complaint window
- 20 days to complain to the CADA after a refusal or the deadline lapsing
- Principle
- Administração aberta — access is the rule, restriction the exception
- Fees
- Access is free; reproduction charged at cost
- Enforcement
- CADA opinions, then intimação before the administrative courts
- Languages
- English, Português
Built for Portugal — LADA
One platform for the whole access-and-privacy mandate, pre-configured for this regime and running in your own Microsoft 365 tenant.
The 10-working-day clock
One of Europe's shorter deadlines, computed on receipt over Portugal's public-holiday calendar and surfaced on the coordinator's day view — because ten working days leaves no room for a request to sit unassigned.
Grounds cited, not asserted
The Lei 26/2016 restrictions ship as citable grounds applied to specific passages, carried onto the redaction and into the response — which is what a CADA opinion examines.
CADA complaints tracked
A queixa gets its own workspace with its filing date, the body's response, the CADA's opinion, and what the body did next — the sequence that matters if the matter reaches court.
Partial access as the default
Where part of a document is restricted, the rest is still due. Redact at the passage level and release the remainder, with the excision recorded rather than the whole document withheld.
Portuguese throughout
AccessPoint's interface ships natively in Portuguese, and the pack carries Portuguese statutory wording, correspondence templates, and vocabulary.
In your own tenant
Documents and requests stay inside your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant, in the region you choose — no third-party cloud and no vendor access.
Silence is the failure mode
Under LADA, the deadline passing is itself a ground of complaint — and no one has to prove you refused.
Portuguese law treats non-response as its own wrong. An applicant who hears nothing within ten working days may complain to the CADA on that basis alone, without having to characterise the silence as a refusal or argue about the merits of any restriction. That inverts where the risk sits. In systems with long deadlines and a formal denial step, a slow request is a service problem; under LADA a slow request is already a complaint waiting to be filed. AccessPoint's answer is unglamorous and effective: the deadline is computed the moment a request is logged, the request appears on someone's day view immediately, and ageing is visible before the tenth day rather than after it.
Configured out of the box
Installing the pt-lada jurisdiction pack seeds your tenant with everything this regime needs — a starting point you can adjust, not a lock-in.
Related guide: FOI Workflow Quick Check- Lei n.º 26/2016 as the legal-authority spine
- The 10-working-day response clock with Portugal's public-holiday calendar
- The Act's restriction grounds, colour-coded for redaction and citable line by line
- Partial-access handling so releasable portions are produced with excisions recorded
- CADA complaint tracking with the 20-day filing window, opinions, and follow-up
- Administrative-court intimação tracking linked to the originating request
- Portuguese correspondence templates carrying the statutory wording
- A timestamped audit trail for every decision on the request
Portugal — LADA Questions
How long does a Portuguese body have to respond?
Are CADA opinions binding?
Is the platform available in Portuguese?
Where do documents reside?
Run LADA in Your Own Tenant
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