CYIL vol. 9 (2018)

IVANA JELIĆ CYIL 9 ȍ2018Ȏ citizenship if both parents are unknown or of unknown citizenship or are stateless or if the child is stateless. The Law also stipulates naturalization as the ground for acquiring Montenegrin citizenship. Acquisition of Montenegrin citizenship by admission, the Law regulates Articles 8 to 17. Accordingly, Montenegrin citizenship can be acquired by the person who submitted the application and fulfills the conditions of being 18 years old, who has been released from the citizenship of another state, who lawfully and continuously resides for 10 years in Montenegro before submitting a request for admission to Montenegrin citizenship, who has secured accommodation and a permanent source of income in an amount that enables him to material and social security in Montenegro, who has not been legally convicted of unconditional punishment of a person for more than one year for a criminal offense for which he is prosecuted ex officio or the legal consignments of the conviction have ceased in Montenegro or another state, who has the knowledge of the Montenegrin language to the extent that enables basic communication, as well as if there are no obstacles concerning security and defense of Montenegro, and if the person concerned has settled all taxes and other legal obligations. Article 17 of the Law stipulates that the criteria for the conditions referred to in Article 8 are to be determined by the Government of Montenegro, which was done by the Decision on the criteria for determining the conditions for acquiring Montenegrin citizenship by admission, 19 specifying what the term „legal residence“ means. This decision concretized the intention of the legislator, but also extended the scope of the law. Namely, the Government’s decision of 13 September 2012 on the refugees from Albania, allowing them to get access to Montenegrin citizenship, 20 finally a long-standing legal problem has been resolved and the moral burden that Montenegro has been carrying for more than 20 years has been removed. Namely, this is the issue of refugees from the region of Vraka, Albania, who moved to Montenegro in 1991 on the basis of the interstate agreement between the SFRY and the NSR of Albania. Their status has been changing over the past decades, from asylum seeker status, refugees to internally displaced persons, because after entering Montenegro they were kept in asylum seekers premises without any legal status in the country, then they were displaced to Kosovo, and in the late 1990s they escaped back to Montenegro with other non-Albanian population due to the armed conflict. Vračani, as they call themselves, have Montenegrin origin because thay belong to small Montenegrin minority that had stayed living in Albanian side of Skadar lake, after the World War I. Concerning their citizenship, for some years they had Albanian citizenship that was de facto ineffective, some of them got Serbian citizenship due to living in Kosovo while belongmg to Serbia, and some of them became stateless persons, or persons at risk of statelessness. The latter case is most dominant with the children born after leaving Albania in 1991. Montenegrin progress in harmonization of its law and practice with European standards has been monitored by the EU since 2011, and in the last progress report it was concluded 19 Official Gazette of Montenegro nos. 47/08, 80/08, 30/10. 20 In April 2012, the Government of Montenegro set up an expert working group to propose a legal solution regarding the status of the refugees from Albania, Vraka region, which would be in line with international law and legal order of Montenegro. The Government accepted the solution proposed by the working group and, on the basis of it, enabled access to Montenegrin citizenship for about 2000 indivisuals concerned. The author of this artice was a president of the expert working group.

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