The request for constitutional review of the decrees had been made by the then Prime Minister António Costa, in 2024, on his last day in office.
In the Legal Regime of the Process of Delimitation and Disenfranchisement of the Public Water Domain in the Autonomous Region of the Azores, the Constitutional Court declares unconstitutional the rules that assign the Government Council of the Azores “the competence for the approval of proposals for the delimitation of the maritime public domain of the State in the territory of the Autonomous Region of the Azores” and that make such approval “binding for all public authorities.”
In the same decree, rules are considered unconstitutional that “allow the disenfranchisement, through regional legislative decree, of any part of the bed or the margin of the maritime public domain.”
The Constitutional Court also deemed unconstitutional the rules of two decrees that defined the disenfranchisement of the maritime public domain, for reasons of public interest, of land parcels on the island of Santa Maria, precisely because they disenfranchised parcels “belonging to the maritime public domain.”
