Report on Citizenship Law: Ghana gender-based discrimination and retained some differences in the treatment of spouses who register to acquire Ghanaian citizenship through marriage. Another relict from the past is Ghana’s provision that applicants filing for naturalisation still require proof of their ‘good character’. This provision is not only incredibly vague but also astonishingly long-lived;10 it dates back to the colonial administration and its provisions for the status of ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ (Malki 2018). Naturalisation also still requires proficiency in an indigenous language, although lawmakers agreed that the country does not have the means to test and enforce this provision (Republic of Ghana, Parliamentary Debates, 17 Nov 1999). In practice, moreover, ethnic minorities and disadvantaged people still face hurdles with accessing citizenship documentation. With regard to reform, another important issue that remains is the general difficulty of access to naturalisation, particularly in the case of protracted refugees. Although the country does not de jure exclude refugees from applying for Ghanaian citizenship, de facto, the largest group of refugees that the country has hosted, Liberians, was denied citizenship in Ghana. For over 20 years, Liberian refugees lived in a settlement on the outskirts of Accra. When UNHCR passed the Cessation Clause for their refugee status in 2012, these two decades in Ghana were not counted towards their years of residence in the country. Instead, Liberians were given the option of either returning to Liberia (a country that the younger generation among them had never seen in their lives) or being issued a two-year work and residence permit – a period too short to be able to apply for citizenship. Situations like the Liberian case, where a whole new generation grows up as refugees but has no option of becoming citizens of the only country they have lived in, risk leading to statelessness. This issue will be particularly salient for the nearly 12,000 Burkinabe refugees and asylum seekers who have been entering Ghana for the last ten years, particularly since the 2022 coup d’état in Burkina Faso. If the crises in the Sahel region do not abate soon – and nothing points to the direction that they will – the Burkinabe population in Ghana risks a future of citizenship insecurity. 10 Ghana is by far not alone in this regard. The UK and many other Commonwealth countries, for instance, still also retain such a provision. GLOBALCIT 19