The PS had argued that the law raises “serious constitutional reservations” due to the extension of the parties that could make use of common land, and the possibility of renting out plots of this land or making them part of the state’s ‘land bank’.
But in its ruling, the court took the view that, despite the broadening of the beneficiaries, the changes in the law tabled by the right-of-centre government and already approved in parliament do not result in “any ownership change in the ambit of the legal status of these common assets.”
While Portugal’s constitution makes local communities the legal owners of common land, it “does not ... determine the way in which such communities must consider themselves constituted for that purpose, nor contain any criteria on the basis of which the respective delimitation must be legally realised,” the ruling states.
The changes to the law do not, it said, compromise the distinction between the civic and public domains, “nor compromise the communal nature of those means of production.”
Further, it takes the view that, by allowing common land to be exploited through renting it out, “it predisposes a mechanism to make returns from the common land itself, [that are] placed at the disposal of the community itself to be freely decided by it.”