The legislation approved at the regular weekly cabinet meeting, which transposes a European Union directive into national law, serves to amend existing laws on terrorism.

“In the ambit of the European Union, policies for the prevention and repression of terrorism have been reinforced, with a particular effort in the creation of a common framework of rules for all member states, making it possible for anti-terror policy to develop with full respect for the fundamental rights of citizens,” the government said in a statement released after the meeting.

The legislation now approved aims to boost the anti-terror effort in two main ways, according to the statement: by explicitly making it a crime to receive "training for terrorism, in Portugal and abroad" and by "extending the concept of terrorism financing, which is now to cover situations in which the funds made available to terrorist organisations or individual terrorists are used for ends other than the direct practice of acts of terrorism."