Foreign divorce: when Portugal needs a court to confirm

A divorce granted outside Portugal does not become effective here on the day it becomes final. One question decides how it is treated: which country granted it. If the decision came from another EU member state, a Portuguese civil registry office updates your record with the decision and a European certificate, and nothing else is needed. If it came from outside the Union — Brazil, the United Kingdom, the United States — you first need a court action before a Tribunal da Relação, Portugal's Court of Appeal. The action is called revisão e confirmação de sentença estrangeira: review and confirmation of a foreign judgment.

Until that is done, the Portuguese state still treats you as married. That blocks concrete things: you cannot remarry here, and you cannot rely on a partnership that requires you to be free to marry. This page belongs to the language and process track, where we cover what the registry asks for before and after the test.

Was the divorce granted inside the EU? Then there is no court case

Start here, because the answer can save you an entire lawsuit. Since 1 August 2022 the applicable instrument is Council Regulation (EU) 2019/1111 — Brussels II ter, published in Official Journal L 178 of 2 July 2019. Its article 30 says that decisions given in one member state are recognised in the others with no special procedure, and then says the part that matters at a registry counter: no specific formality is required for updating the civil status records of a member state on the basis of a divorce decision given in another member state against which no further appeal lies.

Updating civil status records is precisely what you are trying to do — moving from married to divorced on Portuguese paper. What you bring is the decision plus the certificate that the court of origin issues on a party's request, using the form in Annex II of the regulation. That certificate is the document the European system built for this; it is not a sworn translation you commission yourself. The Portuguese authority may additionally ask for a translation of the free-text fields of the certificate.

Two boundaries before you count on the shortcut. Denmark is not bound by the regulation and did not take part in adopting it, so a Danish divorce falls back on the general rules. And divorce proceedings started before 1 August 2022 remain under the previous instrument, Regulation (EC) No 2201/2003, which this one replaced.

Why a foreign judgment does not stand on its own here

The rule is old, short and has no hidden exceptions. The Code of Civil Procedure opens the chapter by saying that, without prejudice to treaties, conventions, EU regulations and special laws, no decision on private rights handed down by a foreign court has effect in Portugal — whatever the nationality of the parties — unless it has been reviewed and confirmed.

Note the clause about nationality. It answers the most common objection — «but I am Brazilian and I divorced in Brazil, so it is a Brazilian matter». The nationality of the people who divorced changes nothing: what counts is that a foreign court issued the decision and that it is now meant to produce effects in Portugal.

There is one narrow exception. Where the foreign decision is invoked inside proceedings already running in a Portuguese court, purely as a piece of evidence for the judge to weigh, no review is needed. That does not let you remarry and does not change a register; it works inside those proceedings and nowhere else.

Which court, and what it actually examines

The action is filed directly with a Court of Appeal — the one for the area where the person against whom you want to enforce the judgment is domiciled. In a consensual divorce where both sides want the same thing, the two of them commonly appear as joint applicants. If the person to be sued lives abroad and is not in Portugal, jurisdiction moves to the court for the applicant's domicile; and if that is abroad too, the case goes to Lisbon.

Here is the part that calms most people down: the court does not retry your divorce. It does not revisit the grounds, does not reopen the division of property, does not hear witnesses about the marriage. It checks a closed list:

• that there is no doubt about the authenticity of the document or about what the decision means;
• that it became final under the law of the country that issued it;
• that the foreign court's jurisdiction was not engineered to evade the law, and that the matter is not one Portuguese courts reserve to themselves;
• that there is no parallel or already-decided case before a Portuguese court;
• that the respondent was properly served and that both sides were heard on equal terms;
• that the outcome is not manifestly incompatible with Portuguese international public policy.

Two of those — authenticity and public policy — the court checks of its own motion, whether or not anyone raises them. The other four lead it to refuse confirmation only if it notices the gap itself, from the file or from what it knows of the matter.

There is exactly one door onto the substance, and it is reserved: where the foreign judgment was given against a person of Portuguese nationality, that person may argue that the outcome would have been more favourable had the foreign court applied Portuguese substantive law, in the cases where Portuguese conflict rules would have required it. Otherwise the merits are not reopened.

What if the divorce was done at a notary, with no judge?

This is the Brazilian question. Brazilian law lets a couple with no minor or incapable children divorce by public deed at a notary's office, with no court proceedings at all. So can a deed — which is not a judgment — be «reviewed and confirmed»?

It can. And the question was not academic: one couple filed exactly that request, had their application struck out as disclosing no cause of action, and only won at the Supreme Court. The headnote of the ruling of 12 October 2023, case 2810/22.9YRLSB.S1, is a single sentence: a public deed of consensual divorce executed in Brazil at a notarial office is capable of review, and invoking it is a valid cause of action for the special procedure of the Code of Civil Procedure.

Keep that reference. If anyone tells you a notarial deed will not do, that position has already been argued in a Portuguese court — and already overturned above it.

What it costs, and how the case runs

The arithmetic starts somewhere surprising: the value of the case is not the value of anything you own. By statute, actions concerning personal status are worth the Court of Appeal's jurisdictional ceiling plus one cent — and that ceiling is set at 30,000.00 euros. So the case is always worth 30,000.01 euros, wherever the divorce came from.

If cost is what stops you, the step before the action is the legal aid application. We wrote about how to apply for Portuguese legal aid from abroad, because that is where most people give up without knowing they qualified.

On paper the procedure is short:

1. Application

   Filed at the Court of Appeal with the document containing the decision, which must show that it became final in the country of origin.
2. 15 days

   The other party is served and may file an opposition.
3. 10 days

   The applicant may reply, counted from notice of the opposition.
4. 15 days

   Closing submissions by the parties and by the public prosecutor, who always takes part.
5. Judgment

   The Court of Appeal decides under appeal-court rules. Its decision on the merits can be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Notice who is always in the room: the public prosecutor. Not an opponent — in consensual applications they routinely state that every requirement is met — but they are the one who may appeal, even without being a principal party, if they consider that jurisdiction, service of process or public policy was disregarded.

Once you win, where the divorce is actually written down

Confirmation is not the finish line; it is what unlocks registration. For a Portuguese national, the foreign decision, once reviewed and confirmed, is registered directly as an annotation to the relevant entries — and the law designed the circuit so that the citizen does not carry the paperwork: the Court of Appeal notifies the registry office that holds the entry.

For a foreign national, the decision is registrable on the same terms, but the form changes with what Portugal already holds: an annotation if the entry it should be attached to exists in the Portuguese civil register, and a fresh entry if it does not. That is the difference between someone who transcribed their marriage in Portugal and someone who never did — and the reason two people with identical stories get different instructions at the counter.

Why this surfaces in the middle of a nationality file

Because marital status is a silent precondition of several routes, and it only becomes visible when it blocks one. Portuguese civil law treats an earlier, undissolved marriage as an absolute impediment to marrying — and adds that the impediment stands even where the marriage was never entered in the civil register at all. A marriage Portugal never recorded still bars the next one. It is the same stone that closes the de facto union route to anyone with a marriage still undissolved and that stops people who expected to use the marriage route to Portuguese nationality, which requires a valid, subsisting marriage.

So the practical order is: get your marital status right in the Portuguese registers first, then file the application that depends on it. Reversing the order costs twice — once for the case, and again for the wait.

If your route is naturalisation rather than marriage, the next step is a different one: finding out what the exam will ask of you. You can measure that in ten minutes with our Portuguese citizenship test simulator.