{"id":1778,"date":"2025-02-04T16:55:54","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T16:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vf-advogados.pt\/?p=1778"},"modified":"2025-05-02T11:52:21","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T10:52:21","slug":"liability-for-service-malfunction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vf-advogados.pt\/en\/knowledge\/liability-for-service-malfunction\/","title":{"rendered":"Liability for Service Malfunction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Legal Brief by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vf-advogados.pt\/en\/team\/#carlos-vasconcelos\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Carlos Vasconcelos<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The end of 2024 was marked by news reports about deaths allegedly linked to delays in emergency medical assistance provided by INEM &#8211; the National Institute for Medical Emergencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to public reports, the strike by pre-hospital emergency physicians and the resulting reduction in the number of medical emergency professionals on duty caused serious disruptions in responding to calls for help and deploying resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Setting aside potential criminal liability issues that could be debated and adjudicated, the situation, in abstract terms, calls into question the legal framework of <strong>the State\u2019s and other public entities&#8217; extra-contractual civil liability for service malfunction<\/strong>, explicitly provided for in paragraphs 3 and 4 of Article 7 of <strong>Law No. 67\/2007, of December 31<\/strong>. This framework can be seen as a <em>tertium genus<\/em>, somewhere between subjective and objective liability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to these legal provisions\u2014enshrining a solution that had already been applied by the courts for years\u2014the State and other public legal entities are <strong>civilly liable for damages<\/strong> when they result from <strong>an abnormal functioning of the service<\/strong>. Thus, an obligation to compensate arises even if the damage was not caused by the specific actions of a particular officeholder, employee, or agent, or if it is impossible to establish individual responsibility for the act or omission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What must be demonstrated, in each specific case, is that, given the circumstances and reasonable performance standards, the service was expected to act in a way that could have prevented the damage from occurring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The end of 2024 was marked by news reports about deaths allegedly linked to delays in emergency medical assistance provided by INEM &#8211; the National Institute for Medical Emergencies.","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1775,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[152,149,150],"class_list":["post-1778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-knowledge","tag-legal-brief","tag-carlos-vasconcelos-en","tag-health-law"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - 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