Maria Lúcia Amaral arrives at MAI after eight years at the Ombudsman's Office

Constitutionalist Maria Lúcia Amaral becomes Minister of Internal Administration after having spent eight years at the head of the Ombudsman's Office, an institution responsible for receiving complaints from citizens who see their fundamental rights violated.

At 68 years old, Maria Lúcia Amaral was the choice of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro to replace Margarida Blasco as Minister of Internal Administration.

Maria Lúcia Amaral was first elected Ombudsman by the Assembly of the Republic on October 20, 2017, taking office on November 2 of the same year, and four years later, on December 3, 2021, she took office for a second term.

The newly appointed Minister of Internal Affairs, who was almost finishing her second term as Ombudsman, considered in an interview with Lusa, in 2021, that the violence committed by the police are “exceptional cases” and do not constitute “the rule”, denying the existence of “repeated systematic practices” of discriminatory violence.

More recently, also in an interview with Público/Renascença in December 2024 and asked about the way the Portuguese police treat minorities, she responded: “It is often the opposite of what international reports say about the Portuguese State, namely the CPT – Committee for the Prevention of Torture of the Council of Europe. These reports say that we have a systemic problem in the security forces regarding ill-treatment. The truth is that the ombudsman does not see this. The ombudsman does not corroborate this in its visits and in its reports, in any way”.

Maria Lúcia Amaral, who was the first woman to head the Ombudsman's Office, was elected by the Assembly of the Republic to the Constitutional Court in 2007 and five years later became vice-president of Palácio Ratton, a position she held until 2016.

Born in Angola on June 10, 1957, the new Minister of Internal Administration is a jurist and professor at the Faculty of Law of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she taught the subjects of Constitutional Law, Comparative Public Law, History of Political Ideas, Fundamental Rights, Constitutional Justice and Legal Methodology.

He is a member of several scientific associations of Public Law and Constitutional Law, disciplines to which he has dedicated all his research and publication activity.