14/01/2024
"PORTUGAL AMENDS NATIONALITY LAW"
The 5-Year Naturalization Period Starts now
From Application date (Rather Than Approval date)
Portugal’s parliament approved changes to the country’s nationality law that will allow residents to start counting their five years to citizenship from the day they applied for residency, rather than from the date they received approval.
This could mean saving several years off the time to citizenship.
Under the previous legislation, foreign residents of Portugal were eligible to apply for Portuguese citizenship five years after the approval of their residence permit in the country. Due to severe administrative delays with the country’s immigration authorities, however, the time between a residence permit application and its approval can extend to two or more years.
As a consequence, the time it takes, for example, a golden visa investor to reach the naturalization eligibility stage can, in practice, take 7-8 years from the date on which they filed their initial application. These administrative delays have affected a wide range of residency types, not merely those based on investments.
This state of affairs gave rise to a situation in which individuals applying for residency saw their path to citizenship lengthened by several years compared to what’s foreseen in the law, not through any fault of their own but because of the state’s inability to process applications in a timely manner. In the case of golden visa investors, for example, while the legislation supposes a processing time of no more than three months, the actual processing time now exceeds two years.
To address this injustice, the amended law’s Article 15 now contains a new rule, which reads as follows: “For the purposes of counting the legal residence periods provided for in this law, the time elapsed since the moment the temporary residence title was requested is also considered if it is approved.”
This new rule recognizes the damage that the delay in the analysis by public services causes to applicants and aims to overcome this failure through an administrative and automatic measure.
It’s important to note that the amendments have yet to take effect… They will go to the President, who can approve them, veto them, or submit them to the Constitutional Court for analysis.
