The amendments to the Croatian Citizenship Act (Official Gazette nos. 53/91, 70/91, 28/92, 113/93, 4/94, 130/11, 110/15, 102/19, 138/21; hereinafter: CCA) that entered into force on 1 January 2020 materially clarified the institution of acquisition of citizenship on the basis of emigration and descent from emigrants. The legislature’s principal aim was to define the term “emigrant” more precisely and to limit and systematize the criteria by which the right of descendants and their spouses to facilitated acquisition of citizenship is determined.
The amendments to Article 11 CCA direct attention to the material facts of emigration: the statutory definition of an emigrant requires that the person emigrated from the territory of the Republic of Croatia with the intention of permanent residence abroad. The amendments also introduced generational limits for descendants (up to the third degree in the direct line) and enumerated exceptions excluding the application of Article 11 CCA (for example, emigration based on an international agreement, renunciation of citizenship, or change of residence within the state unions that then included the Republic of Croatia). The legislature therefore adopted a material-test approach to status determination, meaning that the rights of descendants do not depend on the formal administrative classification of family members but on the actual genealogical and migratory facts (Government of the Republic of Croatia, Explanatory Memorandum to the Draft Amendments to the CCA, 2019).
In applying Article 11 CCA it is crucial to prove that the ancestor emigrated specifically from the territory of the Republic of Croatia and that there was an intention of permanent residence abroad. In practice this requires primary documentary evidence: the domovnica (proof of domicile / registry extracts), deregistration of residence or passports with visas/stamps, certificates of registration of residence issued by local authorities abroad, employment and social security records in the destination state, pension documentation and tax records.
It is also pertinent to mention the ship’s manifest (passenger list). A ship’s manifest is an official list of passengers at embarkation or disembarkation and may be highly valuable evidence of an ancestor’s emigration because it records the date and route of travel, passenger name, age, nationality, port of departure and destination. As a primary source contemporaneous with the emigration, a manifest can establish that the ancestor physically left the territory of Croatia (or the former Yugoslavia) and the place to which they proceeded permanently, thereby helping to prove actual emigration and the chronology of migration. For voyages from Croatia or the former Yugoslavia relevant sources include port archives (for example the archives of the ports of Rijeka, Split and others) and maritime archives, the State Archives of the Republic of Croatia and local municipal archives (registry offices, municipal archives), the Croatian State Archives and its branches, shipowners’ archives or commercial databases that have digitized manifests (for example Ancestry, Findmypast, and the Ellis Island databases for the USA).
In light of the foregoing, applicants for Croatian citizenship should endeavour to submit the most original and temporally coherent documentation of their ancestors’ migration, including official certificates of residence registrations and deregistrations, employment and social security records, and pension documents. With respect to spouses, applicants should systematically document the genealogical chain and the authenticity of evidence of their ancestors’ emigration.
Prepared by: Jelena Nađ and Anja Juršetić Šepčević, attorneys — partners at the law firm JURŠETIĆ & ALEKSOVSKI d.o.o.