Report on Citizenship Law: East Timor (Timor-Leste) 4. Current political debates and reforms As pointed out at the start of this report, the Timorese citizenship regime has not yet reached the courts. A case law search on the Timorese courts’ website only produced one result and this was not a ‘citizenship case’.140 The dispute centred on the illicit occupation of a house and one of the arguments used by the occupants to contest the ownership of the house by the claimant was that she was an Indonesian citizen and therefore could not own immovable assets in Timor-Leste. The claimant’s Timorese citizenship was accepted as unquestionable by the Court of Appeal on the simple grounds that she had proved to have been born in the city of Baucau, Timor-Leste, on 6 June 1961. The Court of Appeal mentioned Article 3 (2) and (3) of the Constitution as well as Article 8 (1) and (2) of the Nationality Act, but there is no indication that it checked whether the claimant also fulfilled other constitutional and legal requirements for the attribution of Timorese citizenship besides birth in the territory. From the brief references in the text of the judgement, it is not possible to assess whether the claimant was born to a Timorese parent, to parents also born in Timor-Leste, to unknown parents, to stateless parents or to parents of unknown citizenship. The superficial way in which the Court of Appeal addressed the issue can be taken as representative of the general approach to citizenship issues in the country. As pointed out throughout this report, the legal framework set by ordinary legislation is full of terminological and regulatory inconsistencies and is often at odds with the constitutional norm, which raises questions as to its validity. A thorough legal reform seems to be in order. The criteria set by the Constitution need refinement, to dispel doubts as to their scope (e.g. by setting temporal benchmarks) and to align the Timorese legal system with the requirements of International Law as to effective ties between the citizen and the state of citizenship. The Nationality Act and the Nationality Regulation need to be revised in order to eliminate all the provisions which do not pass constitutional muster and to gain precision and consistency. There are also important questions still to be addressed, either in the Constitution or in ordinary legislation, concerning, for instance, the effects of loss of citizenship on land ownership in Timor-Leste. 140 Judgment of the Court of Appeal of 15 March 2010, Case no. AC-10-03-2010-P-12-CIV-09-TR, available at https://www.tribunais.tl/?q=node/4 [05.02.2017]. RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2017/7 - © 2017 Author 41