Administrative law

The twenty-fifth entry is a incompetência do órgão, and it is the line on this page an English reader is likeliest to take as an insult. In everyday English « incompetence » is a judgement passed on a person: the word says that somebody cannot do the job, and « an incompetent official » is an accusation with no appeal in it. None of that is present here. A incompetência do órgão says only that the body which signed had no power to sign — the file belonged to another office, another level, another ministry — and the civil servant who wrote it may have been the ablest person in the building. The same gap runs through the positive form. A competência is the set of matters an authority is allowed to decide, while « competence » in ordinary English is a person’s ability; only the language of the European institutions kept the older continental sense, in phrases such as « areas of Union competence ». So the safe renderings here are « lack of jurisdiction », « lack of power » or « acting outside its powers », and « incompetence » is best left to describe people.