With a view to address the status of the administrative activity in Cape Verde and aiming at establishing a new relationship between the State and the community, a Code of Administrative Procedure ("CPA") was approved, by means of Legislative Decree No. 1/2023, of 2 October 2023, that comes into force today. The CPA is based on the logic of an opened Public Administration that promptly and effectively responds to the different forms of interaction between the public, private and social sectors.

The main goal of this statute is to implement the principles of dematerialization and de-bureaucratization and the same aims at promoting transparency and legal certainty by means of modernizing, standardizing, and codifying, in a single law, several existent statutes on public law that had been scattered across several separate diplomas, most of which were no longer in line with the current Cape Verdean's legal-administrative scenario.

The main innovations enshrined in the CPA include, among others:

• The definition of a general regime applicable to complaints and administrative appeals;
• The preferential provision of public services by digital means, safeguarding those situations in which its use is not possible;
• The across-the-board reduction in the general time limits for administrative procedures, with the obligation to provide information to interested parties on the progress of cases within 10 days, as well as finalizing cases within a general time limit of 60 days (rather than the previous 90-days term), as well as setting a supplementary time limit of 5 days for notifying interested parties of administrative acts;
• The deletion of the concept of "tacit refusal", which has been replaced by the "failure to fulfil the duty to decide", which grants the interested party the possibility of asking the relevant administrative bodies for their obligation to carry out the owed administrative act; and
• The redefinition and the increase in the list of null administrative acts.

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