Julia Schweers five years before being able to apply for Ghanaian citizenship (Constitution of 1979, section 15(5)). No other options for acquiring Ghanaian citizenship after a period of residence are detailed in the constitution. Between the 1979 Constitution and Ghana’s transition to democracy in 1992, when today’s Constitution was written, no further amendments to Ghana’s citizenship law were passed. This was also a period of economic instability and massive emigration (Abdulai and Crawford 2010; Nugent 1995) during which Ghana no longer attracted immigration the way it did in the early years after independence (Schans et al. 2018). It was during this period of large-scale outmigration that the politicisation of citizenship law abated. 3. The Current Citizenship Regime Ghana’s current citizenship regime evolved in the 1990s along with the country’s democratisation. It rests on the 1992 Constitution and its 1996 amendment, the 1992 Refugee Act, as well as the 2000 Citizenship Act, which harmonised citizenship law with the Constitution. While it liberalised a number of previous provisions (the 1996 constitutional amendment introduced the right to dual citizenship, and some gendered language was replaced with more neutral language), there is continuity with previous legislation. 3.1. Acquisition of Citizenship 3.1.1 Acquisition of Citizenship at Birth The 1992 Constitution states in section 6(2) that, ‘a person born in or outside Ghana after the coming into force of this Constitution, shall become a citizenship of Ghana at the date of his birth if either of his parents or grandparents is or was a citizen of Ghana.’. With such a formulation, the 1992 constitution moved away from differentiating between citizens born inside and outside of Ghana, a distinction that most previous Ghanaian citizenship laws had upheld. Following the 1969 constitution, the 1992 constitution bases automatic acquisition of citizenship only on descent, but provides that descent can be based on grandparents as well as parents whether a child is born in or outside of Ghana – whereas the 1979 constitution had restricted rights from grandparents to those born in the country. It thus leaves the door open for second-generation diasporans to retain their Ghanaian citizenship, even if their parents forfeited theirs. The 1992 constitution provides for existing citizens to retain citizenship (section 6(1)). For people born before the coming into force of the 1992 constitution, the acquisition of citizenship at birth depends on the year of birth and the citizenship regime in place at that time. The 2000 Citizenship Act details which rules are applied according to year of birth. The act does not follow all the frequent changes to citizenship law between 1957 and 1979, but it differentiates between four groups of people and the respective provisions applicable to them. Persons born before independence (6 March 1957) are citizens by birth if they are born in Ghana and at least one parent or grandparent was born in Ghana or if they were born outside Ghana and at least one parent was born in Ghana. Persons born on or after 6 March 1957 but before 22 August 1969 are citizens by birth if they are either born in Ghana and at least one grandparent was born in Ghana or if they were born outside Ghana and at least one parent and at least one grandparent or great-grandparent was born in Ghana. Furthermore, children born in this period to parents who had acquired Ghanaian citizenship other than by birth would be citizens by birth if they were born in Ghana and at least one parent had naturalised or if 8 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies - EUI