Police organisation
Polícia Judiciária
Portugal’s criminal-investigation police, to which Law 49/2008 reserves the most serious offences.
At a glance
- Official name
- Polícia Judiciária (PJ)
- System
- Portugal
- Level of government
- National
- Kind of body
- Criminal investigation agency
- Status
- Currently operating
- Facts last checked against sources
- 13 September 2026
What it is
The Polícia Judiciária is one of the three general-competence criminal-police bodies, and article 7(2) of Law 49/2008 reserves the most serious crimes to it. Reservation is the structural point: Portugal does not leave the allocation of grave cases among its police bodies to practice or negotiation but fixes it in the statute that organises criminal investigation.
What it covers
National, with the offences reserved to it by article 7(2) of Law 49/2008.
Broad responsibilities
- Criminal investigation as a body of general competence
- Investigation of the offences the statute reserves to it
Elsewhere on this site
- Who polices what — how Portugal is structured, against other systems
Other organisations to compare
- Polícia de Segurança Pública — Portugal
- Guarda Nacional Republicana — Portugal
Where this connects
Institutions: National police.
Sources
Law 49/2008 — Organisation of Criminal Investigation (LOIC), consolidated text
Diário da República (via the Polícia Judiciária official site) · Legislation · 2008-08-27 · link verified 2026-07-26
The consolidated LOIC text (an official Diário da República version hosted on the Polícia Judiciária site), fetched as a PDF and text-extracted, verified verbatim. Supports Art. 2(1) ("a direcção da investigação cabe à autoridade judiciária competente em cada fase do processo" — direction of the investigation belongs to the competent judicial authority at each stage) and Art. 2(4) (the criminal-police bodies act under the direction and functional dependence of that authority); Art. 3(1) naming the three general-competence criminal-police bodies — the Polícia Judiciária (PJ), the Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR) and the Polícia de Segurança Pública (PSP); and Art. 7(2) reserving the most serious crimes to the Polícia Judiciária.