Amendments to Law on Citizenship Proposed

The Parliament of Georgia is set to discuss proposed amendments to the law on Georgian citizenship.

Current legislation stipulates that a person must live in Georgia for five years before being eligible for citizenship. The major change proposed by the draft law would increase this time to up to 10 years.

Many citizenship-seekers, however, do not follow the standard procedure to obtain Georgian citizenship, but instead qualify for one of the several alternative routes. Currently, a person may obtain citizenship outside the standard procedure if he or she has “made an outstanding contribution to Georgia,” or in “cases when granting a Georgian citizenship to the person is in the national interests of the country,” according to the State Commission on Migration Issues.

If an applicant is married to a Georgian citizen, the application procedure is simplified, and the residency requirement is just two years, as long as the applicant knows the Georgian language, Georgian history, and the basics of Georgian law. Newly proposed categories of alternative route qualifications are people who have made a significant investment in the country’s economic development, or have great talent in sports, science, or the arts and wants to represent Georgia in their field of talent.

A person may currently obtain Georgian citizenship while maintaining a second citizenship only at the discretion of the President. The draft law proposes to transfer this function to the Public Service Development Agency.

For Georgians living abroad, new rules have been proposed, announced to members of the diaspora at this weekend’s Diaspora Forum, that would simplify the process of obtaining dual citizenship. The draft law proposes that Georgians will be able to maintain their citizenship while adding another if a person has a family member who is a citizen of the second country, and if he or she has lived in the country for at least five years.

The draft law being discussed was introduced by the Parliamentary Committee on Legal Issues.

In 2017, President Giorgi Margvelashvili granted 3,000 people Georgian citizenship.

By Samantha Guthrie

Photo: State Commission on Migration Issues

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