Lisbon, September 19, 2025 (Lusa) — The Minister of National Defense has requested the three branches of the Armed Forces to deploy personnel to assist the Directorate-General of Human Resources in expediting the processes for issuing the Veteran’s Card.
“We held a meeting with representatives from the three branches of the Armed Forces to whom we made an appeal: deploy personnel to the Ministry of National Defense to work alongside the new directorate-general’s staff, to process these requests, to evaluate them, and to conclude them in a timeframe I would describe as equally swift,” announced Nuno Melo at the sidelines of a ceremony at the Ministry of Defense in Lisbon.
The official and CDS-PP president emphasized that out of a total of 430,000 requests for the Veteran’s Card, “we are currently only about 11,000 short.”
“Nonetheless, we believe we need to provide a quicker response to these card processes,” he asserted.
The Veteran’s Card grants these former military personnel access to benefits such as exemption from health service fees under the National Health Service, medication subsidies, free transportation, funeral honors, among others.
Nuno Melo spoke to journalists after the ceremony for signing the first orders related to requests for recognition of Armed Forces disability status, about 200 of them, processed by a task force established by the government for this purpose.
The minister noted that decisions regarding the status of Armed Forces disabilities were taking an average of six years, something he described as “absolutely unacceptable.”
Melo recalled that it was for this reason the government moved forward with this task force, composed of 40 lawyers selected by their Order, “who underwent training at the Directorate-General of Defense Resources to ensure these pending processes, hundreds of them, were decided within an estimated period of 30 to 60 business days.”
