Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares called on embassies and consulates abroad to prepare and expedite the procedures for applicants who want to benefit from the new grandchildren’s law.
The Objective newspaper had access to a circular stating that the head is phoning diplomatic headquarters to be ready to take a “significant volume” of applications for citizenship that will arrive with the enactment of the Democratic Memory Act.
According to the minister, “the consulates that may have the most requests will be reinforced” “taking as a starting point the workload data generated by the Historical Memory Law at the time”.
He also addressed the advisability of setting up a prior appointment system and that the adult sons and daughters of Spaniards, whose nationality was recognized by the Historical Memory Law, could be cared for “without an appointment”.
“The files submitted by these applicants will be relatively simple as they essentially consist of the application, their birth certificate and their Spanish father/mother’s birth certificate. In this case, the others would only be visited by appointment. Applicants,” the circular reads.
It is also proposed that embassies and consulates set up a “special” shift of duty “outside normal public hours”, which may be attended by any authorized reinforcement troops.
The regulations will allow thousands of descendants of Spaniards to process nationality even if their predecessors lost or gave it up for political reasons, ideologies of faith or sexual orientation and identity, the publication points out.
The text of the quoted Bill approved by the Senate last week by 128 votes in favour, 113 against and 18 abstentions, is pending publication in the Official Gazette (BOE) and contains an eighth additional provision in favor of the descendants of Spaniards who fled Spain due to the civil war and the period of the Franco dictatorship.
Such Provision was called “grandchildren’s law”and extends the granting of Spanish nationality to descendants of exiles.
The Historical Commemoration Law passed in 2007 under the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero virtually eliminated the latter, only registering around 250,000 people who requested it, the vast majority of them in France, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela and Y Cuba.
In the new law on grandchildren, introduced as an amendment to the legislation on historical memory, Spanish nationality could be acquired in two ways in the Cuban case:
– The first opens the door to citizenship for the descendants of exiled Spanish women who lost their citizenship by marrying a foreigner before 1978.
– The adult sons and daughters of Spaniards whose nationality of origin has been recognized on the basis of the right of option also benefit.
The “grandchild law” provides for a two-year period to submit applications for citizenship, with the possibility of a one-year extension, but diplomatic sources told the newspaper that the flood of applications will not necessitate such an extension because the government “the urgency of having voters” as the election approaches.
These moves to speed up the processing of applications indicate “an interest” by Albares in speeding up nationalizations ahead of the 2023 election cycle, the newspaper reported.