Report on Citizenship Law: Ghana Julia Schweers12 1. Introduction Ghana’s citizenship laws were first defined with independence from British colonial rule in 1957. Its early citizenship laws established the so-called ‘Lancaster House’ model, which other African states later also used to determine membership at independence, such as Nigeria or Sierra Leone (Khan 2021; Manby 2018, 61, 324-325; Manby and Momoh 2020). Commonalities included similar formulations of citizenship acquisition at birth for those born before and after independence – namely unconditional jus soli for those born after independence and double jus soli for those born before independence; and descent-based citizenship through the father for those born outside the country. Ghana also set the pattern for differentiation between two forms of citizenship acquisition after birth: through registration and through naturalisation. Registration was an easier and more straightforward form of citizenship acquisition, primarily reserved for citizenship acquisition upon marriage, while naturalisation was at the discretion of the government and needed the approval of a minister. Since then, Ghana’s citizenship regime has undergone many changes. There are particularly two periods that are marked by frequent amendments to citizenship law. First, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the country's citizenship laws were politicised and used as a tool of anti-immigration politics, denationalising sections of the Ghanaian population on the basis of their or their ancestors' migratory background. This was not exclusively but particularly targeted at persons of Middle Eastern descent. Second, over the course of the 1990s, with the transition into democracy, the country rewrote its citizenship laws into the ones that are in force today, basing automatic citizenship now entirely on descent and deleting some – but not all – gender inequalities the old laws enshrined. As many other countries with large diasporas, Ghana also introduced dual citizenship over the course of the 1990s. This report provides an overview of the Ghanaian history of citizenship law since independence and sets out the country’s current citizenship regime, which consists of the 1992 Constitution, its 1996 dual citizenship amendment, the 2000 Citizenship Act, as well as the 1992 Refugee Act. It outlines Ghana’s most important current political debate on citizenship, namely, whether dual citizens should be allowed to hold important public offices. So far, the laws have answered that question with a clear ‘no’. However, a procedural issue pertaining to this question has recently been brought before the Ghanaian Supreme Court, which has sparked a wider debate. The report concludes with an outlook on future issues that might arise from Ghana’s current citizenship laws and practice, particularly the handling of protracted refugee status and refugees’ de facto lack of access to naturalisation in Ghana. 1 Julia Schweers is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre. This report draws on her doctoral thesis ‘Citizenship Abroad, Capital at Home: How Global Inequalities Affect the Value of Dual Citizenship’ (2023) which discusses return migration with dual citizenship, taking Ghana as a case study. 2 Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Bronwen Manby for her thorough and careful review of this report. 1