Speaking to journalists at the end of the Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms, and Guarantees Committee regarding the new nationality law, Jorge Rodrigues da Ponte mentioned a potential increase in nationality requests due to the rising number of people in a legal situation in Portugal.
Currently, the National Registry and Notary Institute (IRN) has 522,000 pending requests, and between 2018 and 2024, 16 percent of nationality requests were due to naturalization through residency. The existing law requires a citizen to have legally resided in the country for at least five years before applying.
The regularization of immigrants in Portugal over the last two years (about one million) may allow these individuals to access citizenship in the coming years through residency in Portugal.
Jorge Rodrigues da Ponte stressed that an automatic connection cannot be made but acknowledged, “Undoubtedly, we will have many nationality requests at that time, because people have the conditions to do so and reside in national territory.”
Currently, the response time for a nationality request, which is handled differently depending on the type of application, “can take up to three years,” and the “volume of pending cases is high.”
The official highlighted the technical complexity of each application: “Opening the process, analyzing the documents, fulfilling the necessary requirements, waiting for the requested documents to be returned, and then making a decision and registering.”
Many delays result from waiting for documents from applicants, noted Jorge Rodrigues da Ponte, emphasizing that these cases are not segregated.
“We probably don’t have as many active pending processes,” he said.
To address the expected increase in demand, the IRN has introduced several technological tools to streamline processes and facilitate access to other public administration documents in an interoperable manner.
The goal is “to relieve applicants from having to request various documents from different public administration entities to submit to the IRN,” explained the official.
During the hearing, Jorge da Ponte informed the deputies that the Sephardic law, which grants nationality to descendants of Jews expelled from Portugal, has added additional pressure.
“In 2021, we had 50,000 requests under this legal provision, which rose to 124,000 requests in 2022,” he said, noting that this “substantial increase largely justifies the increased burden on IRN services.”
Of the 522,000 pending requests, 158,000 concern Sephardic Jews, 106,000 involve requests for naturalization through legal residency in Portuguese territory, 71,000 involve grandchildren of Portuguese citizens, and an “expanded set of about 142,000 processes of assignment to children of Portuguese parents born abroad,” explained the IRN official.
