For a country where legal cases can take years, the backlog may just have become a great deal lighter.
Around 14 kilos, or 810 metres of pages of State newspaper Diário da República, have today ‘disappeared’.
It’s all part of a purge (or ‘progamme’) dubbed Revoga+, designed to shed obsolete laws.
Thursday’s excision dealt with 1,200 laws from the 80s.
Said secretary of state for the presidency of the council of ministers Tiago Antunes, the laws correspond to “around 2,700 pages of Diário da República.
“If they were lined up they’d reach a distance of around 810 metres”, he said. “Printed, their weight would come to around 14 kilos”.
Describing the laws that were never ‘revoked’ – simply left to moulder – as “regulatory pollution”, Antunes explained that the work of getting rid of them has been “very demanding”.
It was certainly not a question of just getting busy with a shredder: “A specialised team has carried out an exhaustive analysis of hundreds and hundreds of decrees, with a lot of caution and rigor”, he told reporters.
It’s unclear whether the decree-dump has shed any legal cases that may well have been quietly gnawed by rodents in the country’s creaking law courts (click here), but as the saying goes, ‘it’s definitely a move in the right direction’.
