Eduardo González
Yesterday, the Council of Ministers extended by one year the deadline to apply for Spanish nationality through the Democratic Memory Law (popularly known as the “Grandchildren Law”) of October 2022, a procedure that has been translated, until date, in more than 300,000 applications and around 110,000 grants of nationality.
Last February, the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, announced the Government's intention to extend by one year, until October 2025, the deadline to apply for Spanish nationality, a few days after the Council General of Spanish Citizenship Abroad (CGCEE) warned that the shortage of personnel was causing a “saturation” in the “general consulates that are underfunded for this process.” As admitted last April by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Consulates General of Buenos Aires, Caracas, Havana and Mexico only had 80 employees to deal with more than 138,000 applications for Spanish nationality in application of the Grandchildren Law.
“In some Consular Offices, despite the efforts made to provide them with additional resources, the two-year period is not sufficient to absorb the demand for appointments for the exercise of the right,” the Executive declared yesterday. Consequently, “there are a number of applicants who will hardly be able to be summoned and attended to before the end of the two-year period provided for in the aforementioned eighth additional provision of the Law,” the Government admitted. Therefore, the extension represents “magnificent news that will be applauded by the Spaniards who once again assume that they are Spaniards again with all the established legal parameters,” Ángel Víctor Torres declared yesterday at the press conference after the Council of Ministers.
Since the entry into force of the Law and until March 31, the Consular Civil Registry Offices received a total of 301,121 applications to apply for Spanish nationality of origin. More than 95 percent of the applications were received at the Consular Offices of Spain in Latin America and at the Consulate General of Spain in Miami. Specifically, the five Consulates General of Spain in Argentina represent 40 percent of the applications, and, together with the Consulate General of Spain in Havana, they exceed 53 percent of the applications. According to CGCEE data, as of December 31, around 110,000 applicants had already received nationality.
The Democratic Memory Law allows access to Spanish nationality to people who were not eligible for it between 2008 and 2011 under the protection of the Historical Memory Law approved in 2007 by the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, by virtue of which Around 250,000 descendants of Franco's exiles were naturalized, especially in the consulates of France, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba.
The current rule, in force since October 2022, grants Spanish nationality to “those born outside Spain to a father or mother, grandfather or grandmother, who originally would have been Spanish, and who, as a consequence of having suffered exile for political reasons, ideological or belief or sexual orientation and identity, would have lost or renounced Spanish nationality.”
Likewise, it includes other option cases, such as sons and daughters born abroad of Spanish women who lost their nationality by marrying foreigners before the entry into force of the 1978 Constitution; or the sons and daughters of legal age of those Spaniards whose nationality has been recognized through the Historical Memory Law and the Democratic Memory Law. The law established a period of two years, from its entry into force, to carry out the processing, although there was the possibility of a one-year extension if the Council of Ministers so agreed at the end of the first two years, as has happened.
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