Julia Schweers There is one group that has recently been granted preferential immigration status and access to Ghanaian citizenship, namely African Americans. In 2019, the Akufo-Addo government launched the ‘Year of Return, Ghana 2019’ initiative. The year-long initiative commemorated 400 years since enslaved Africans first reached North America and tried to foster tourism and business relations between Ghana and the US (Government of Ghana 2019; see for immigration status of African Americans: Ghanaian Ministry of Interior 2023). The initiative has been criticised for its focus on the US and lack of interest in other, less affluent, countries to which victims of the transatlantic slave trade had also been brought, such as Brazil or Haiti. The critique is that the initiative had been primarily driven by economic goals and not by a wish to engage with the history of slavery (Yeboah 2019). As part of the commemoration programme, the Ghanaian government had also planned to naturalise 200 African Americans (Azar 2019). There seems to have been an increase in naturalisation numbers in Ghana during and after the Year of Return; with one diaspora organisation reporting the naturalisation of 126 diasporans in 2022 (Tetteh 2020; African Diaspora Group 2022). It is, however, not clear to what extent these numbers stem from recent Ghanaian emigrants who felt compelled to (re-)acquire their Ghanaian citizenship and to what extent they stem from descendants of victims of slavery. At least two high-profile cases of naturalisation after birth through special legislative treatment occurred in February 2023 and May 2024. In 2023, two of three living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre8 were given Ghanaian citizenship in an opulent ceremony at the Ghanaian embassy in Washington (Brown 2023) and in 2024, the Ghanaian President conferred Ghanaian citizenship upon Stevie Wonder (The Presidency of the Republic of Ghana 2024). 4. Current Political Debates and Reform Plans: Extending the Political Rights of Dual Citizens An ongoing debate concerns the political rights of dual citizenship. Particularly, it concerns the question of whether members of parliament should be allowed to have dual citizenship. Currently, the constitution holds that dual citizens are barred from a range of public offices, including members of parliament. Both political parties, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) (which has held the Ghanaian presidency since 2017) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), seem to be generally open to amending the constitution and extending dual citizens’ political right to run for public office. With the general elections of December 2024, the question of MPs’ right to dual citizenship, however, simultaneously became a campaign issue and a means to discredit oppositional candidates. 4.1 Dual Citizenship and Public Offices Case Law The ban on dual citizenship for public officials has been enshrined in the Ghanaian constitution since dual citizenship was introduced in Ghana in 1996. In recent times, the ban has attracted broader public interest, not least due to two legal debates. 8 The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the worst incidents of racist mass murder in the US. Over the course of two days, a white mob destroyed the entire black neighbourhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, killed hundreds of its residents and left thousands homeless. 14 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies - EUI