Portugal has in the past year received electronically 8,000 visa applications, as part of the effort to make consular services permanently accessible from anywhere, its minister of foreign affairs, Augusto Santos Silva, has said.
“The e-Visa platform has since March [2020] received 8,000 visa requests electronically,” he said during a debate in parliament on Wednesday about his ministry’s political responsibilities.
The new visa processing network, already in place, aims to ensure permanent digital access to consular services.
“The objective is clear: that all consular acts that do not require physical presence can be carried out electronically and that the consular services are available 24 hours a day, every day of the year, accessible digitally from anywhere in the world,” he said.
In his opening statement to members of parliament, the minister said that the new consular management model was “one of the flagship projects” of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Recovery and Resilience Plan, stressing that results were already visible.
“The single act of consular management is now applied in almost all [consular] posts,” he said. “The Consular Service Centre is already working for five countries: Spain, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Ireland and Belgium.”
The new consular management model to handle everything digitally that does not require the applicant’s presence was presented by the government as an “essential” element of the digital transformation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs this year, with an indicative budget of €14 million.
The minister also underscored the work done by Portugal in the field of the promotion of the Portuguese language and culture abroad.
“Even in the difficult conditions of the pandemic, this is a burden on which we cannot falter,” he said. “In 2021, the number of professorships of Portuguese studies on the various continents will rise to fifty-three, which compares with the thirty-nine that existed in 2016.”
He also announced the start soon of a project to launch a Portuguese-language dictionary in Mozambique, with funding from Portugal’s Camões cultural and language institute, through the International Institute of the Portuguese Language (IILP).”
“It is the first dictionary of the common language of [late Portuguese author José] Saramago and [Mozambican author] Mia Couto that will be published outside Portugal and Brazil,” he said.
