Listhaug will tighten the conditions for Norwegian citizenship

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The Ministry of Justice and Emergency Affairs will increase the requirement of residency time from seven to ten years in order to obtain Norwegian citizenship.

 yesterday,  the rule is that you must have lived in Norway for seven years to get a Norwegian citizenship. Now the Ministry of Justice and Emergency Affairs proposes to tighten the rules. The Ministry wishes to increase the residency period from seven to ten years. The proposal has been sent for consultation.

Norwegian citizenship is intended to be hard to achieve. Therefore, the requirement for residency time in the country should be longer than seven years. Persons who want to become Norwegian should have long-term ties with Norway, says Minister for Immigration and Integration, Sylvi Listhaug (Frp).

Norway is internationally committed to facilitating access to citizenship for certain groups. The Ministry now proposes to extend the requirement for residency in the country for applicants who are married, registered partner or cohabitant with a Norwegian citizen and for stateless persons from three to five years.

For applicants who arrived in Norway before the age of 18, it is proposed to increase the residency time from five to seven years. For refugees, the ministry will raise the residency period from seven to nine years.

Today, persons who have been imprisoned are not entitled to Norwegian citizenship until a certain period of time has elapsed. The Ministry proposes that applicants who have a conviction must wait longer than today before they can become Norwegian. Listhaug wishes to increase the qualification time so that the minimum qualification period will be three years and the longest 37.5 years.

The ministry also wishes to tighten the rights even more for applicants convicted of actions in “violation of fundamental national interests”. Today, such actions only give a qualifying time similar to other types of punishment.

To prevent terror, we have proposed to deprive persons convicted of acts contrary to fundamental national interests of the right to citizenship. Terrorists should not have the opportunity to become Norwegian, says Listhaug.

 Applications for citizenship
In 2016, 13,700 Norwegian citizenship was granted in Norway. That is 1,300 more than the year before, according to Statistics Norway (SSB). People from Eritrea (1,900), Somalia (1,200), Afghanistan (1,000) and Iraq (800) peaked the list of Norwegian citizens last year.

Figures from the SBB show that it is a very small proportion that actually applies for citizenship after seven years in Norway. Only 4 per cent of immigrants with seven years of residency in Norway became Norwegian citizens in 2013. This is a decline from 1996, when the proportion was 13.3 per cent.

Increased labour immigration could be the reason why fewer immigrants than before become Norwegian citizens. Europeans and Americans do not take Norwegian citizenship to any extent even though they are established in Norway, said SSB’s senior adviser, Silje Vatne Pettersen, to Aftenposten in 2015.

Another reason is probably that you can not have dual citizenship in Norway, according to the newspaper.

Frp also proposed increasing the requirement for residency time from seven to ten years back in 2010. The proposal did not go through the Storting parliament. The 1997 Council of Europe Convention on Citizenship stipulates that no more than ten years of residency may be required for citizenship.

 

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