site.btaParliament Adopts on First Reading Bulgarian Citizenship Act Amendments

MPs adopted here Thursday on first reading three draft bills amending the Bulgarian Citizenship Act. The motives of the bill, submitted by Vazrazhdane leader Kostadin Kostadinov and a group of MPs, note that the fact that  the Bulgarian Citizenship Act has been amended and supplemented around 20 times since 1999 is indicative that this legal framework still needs to be refined in accordance with the policy pursued by Bulgaria on the ways of acquiring Bulgarian citizenship through naturalization. In their view, with regard to the applicant's clean criminal record, there is a need to establish such a circumstance explicitly in the law, and not in subordinate legislation, and with regard to their country of origin or country of residence (if they reside permanently in another country). It is also necessary to reduce the deadline for submitting a document of foreign citizenship exemption in the naturalization procedures.

The bill's sponsors believe that it is important to unify the conditions under the different hypotheses in the current legislation concerning the acquisition of Bulgarian citizenship through marriage to a Bulgarian citizen and that the expiry of the three-year period of cohabitation upon marriage should be applicable in all these cases. In addition, there should be a possibility for a naturalization obtained on that basis to be revoked subsequently if there is evidence that the marriage a marriage of convenience.

According to the sponsors, in all cases of naturalization, Bulgarian language proficiency should be a necessary and mandatory condition for acquiring Bulgarian citizenship, and not only in some cases. It is also necessary to clarify the possibility of obtaining Bulgarian citizenship through naturalization in cases where the Bulgarian State has an interest in it or where the person has special merits for it, in order to avoid any possibility of subjectivism.

In the motives to bill to amend and supplement the Bulgarian Citizenship Act, submitted by Radomir Cholakov (GERB-UDF) and a group of MPs, it is stated that the current bill aims to fill several gaps in the Bulgarian Citizenship Act. These, in the opinion of the sponsors, are the obligatory promulgation in the State Gazette of the decrees of the President of the Republic of Bulgaria on the acquisition of Bulgarian citizenship by naturalization, the restoration of Bulgarian citizenship, the revocation of citizenship and naturalization; the establishment of a procedure/ceremony for the presentation of the certificates of acquisition of Bulgarian citizenship in a solemn manner corresponding to the significance of the act; the publicity of the registers of persons who have acquired Bulgarian citizenship on the basis of a significant public interest.