Constitutional Court of Portugal

21 CONSTITUTIONAL COURT OF PORTUGAL Where can I find the Court’s decisions? The Constitutional Court uses a wide variety of means to disseminate its jurisprudence: – In the Diário da República (the Official Journal) The Constitutional Court’s most important decisions are published in the Diário da República, and in fact the Constitution itself requires that those that are issued with generally binding force be published in this way. Among others, all decisions in which the Court declares the unconstitutionality or illegality of any norm, verifies the existence of an unconstitutionality by omission, or considers the constitutionality and legality of draft referenda, are published in Series I of the Diário . The others (except for merely interlocutory ones or those that simply repeat earlier decisions, whose publication is dispensed with) appear in Series II. These include the Court’s decisions on the annual accounts of political parties and the accounts of election campaigns. Decisions regarding the registration of political parties and the latter’s articles of association are also published in the Diário . – On the Court’s website Constitutional Court Rulings can be found in full, in Portuguese, by going to “Jurisprudência” on the Court’s website ( www.tribunalconstitucional.pt/tc/acordaos) . All the rulings since 1983 are available. The same “Jurisprudência” section also has a database of rulings with various search tools, which users can access by registering free of charge. English versions of summaries of selected Constitutional Court decisions (and in a few cases, the full texts) can be found at www.tribunalconstitucional.pt/tc/en/acordaos . – In the Collection Acórdãos do Tribunal Constitucional Each year the Court organises and publishes a collection of its jurisprudence with interest for legal doctrine, entitled Acórdãos doTribunal Constitucional (in Portuguese). 86 volumes have appeared to date. Since 2010, the collection has been published in e-book form, and in 2013 access to the latter became free of charge.