One year after the approval of the first phase of the programme, the cabinet authorised a new cleaning of the legal system, this time between 1981 and 1985, expressly repealing 1,168 decree-laws.

The secretary of state at the cabinet office, Tiago Antunes, told Lusa that this “is a programme for cleaning the legal system of old, expired, outdated decrees” that, despite “no longer making sense, was never expressly repealed,” causing “confusion.”

According to Antunes, it is “14kg of normative pollution that has now been eliminated.”

Antunes said that this is a thorough work carried out by a “specialised team that exists in the government’s centre of legal expertise.”

When asked about examples of decree-laws that disappeared, Antunes said that many “relate to the escudo,” the currency in Portugal before the euro started to be used in the country on 1 January 1999.

“Because this is, as I said, a thorough work, which takes quite a long time and therefore it will not be possible to make the third phase in this legislature,” he said.

In 2018, the government had already carried out the first phase of this programme, eliminating about 2,300 decree-laws, from 1975 to 1980, Antunes said.