With the purpose of making Public Administration more efficient and facilitating the lives of citizens and companies, the Decree-Law No. 68/2017, of 16 June, was approved, which aims to implement three measures of the SIMPLEX+ Program, in the area of justice.
Firstly, the fourth amendment to the Civil Procedure Code is made in order to enable the issuance of electronic certificates by the courts, which are, for all purposes, equivalent to the certificates currently issued on paper.
This is a value-added service for citizens and companies, as they will be able to access "more easily and more quickly to the relevant judicial information, while creating the conditions to, taking advantage of the benefits of the strong investment made by the area of justice in the use of information and communication technologies, free court clerks for other tasks, thus also contributing to procedural promptness", since the intervention of court clerks is reduced in the preparation of certificates, allowing them to be requested and made available electronically, as stated in the preamble of the diploma concerned.
The system for requesting the issuance of a certificate in the scope of the Online Criminal Register service is also modified so as to enable them to be carried out through an electronic platform, prior to proving the legitimacy of the applicant and his identification data.
This Decree-Law entered into force on 17 June 2017.