Patrícia Jerónimo So, it can be said that, for more than a century before the end of the Portuguese rule over East Timor in 1975, every child born in the territory was a Portuguese citizen, save for the cases in which the ‘diplomatic exception’ applied. The picture is not as clear-cut as that, however, because the 1826 Constitutional Charter identified Catholicism as the religion of the Kingdom and explicitly associated ‘other religions’ with ‘foreignness’, by ruling that all other religions would be allowed to foreigners, provided that the cult was performed in private [Article 6]. The provision was criticised for being discriminatory and inconsistent with the constitutional prohibition of persecution on grounds of religion. Article 6 came to be interpreted, by prominent legal scholars in continental Portugal, as meaning that only Catholics were entitled to Portuguese citizenship by birth, which significantly compromised the potential reach of the Charter’s ius soli rule in the overseas territories. There were, nonetheless, also voices in metropolitan academia and in the colonial administration which dismissed the relevance of Article 6 for the attribution of citizenship and took the Charter’s ius soli at face value. This latter view eventually prevailed and became the norm in the colonial literature and in the official discourse from the late nineteenth century onwards (Silva 2009: 196-212, 227, 233-237).15 With the separation between Church and state in the republican Constitutions of 1911 and 1933, the question was definitively settled. Needless to say, recognition as Portuguese did not mean that all individuals born in East Timor under Portuguese rule were treated as equals. Membership and rights did not go together. Apart from the existence of slavery – in theory, only until 1878, when the de jure abolition of slavery came into effect (Figueiredo 2004: 386) –, there was, until very late in the Portuguese rule over the territory, a marked distinction in legal status between the Portuguese born in continental Portugal (and their offspring) and the indigenous population. The indigenous population was expected to benefit from the Portuguese civilizing mission, but, as noted earlier, the Portuguese colonial administration was ready to accept that many among the natives would not abandon their traditional norms and practices.16 It was therefore deemed inadequate to grant them the same rights as those granted to the ‘citizens of the motherland’ (Silva 2015: 201). The Organic Law for the Civil Administration of the Overseas Provinces, of 1914,17 prescribed that the indigenous population of each colony was to be under the protection of the colony’s governor, who, for that purpose, would inter alia define and regulate the civil, criminal and political status of the natives [Article 16 (1) and (2)].18 Statutes 15 Consider, for instance, Opinion no. 331 of the Superior Council for the Colonies, annexed to the 1930 Colonial Act (Acto Colonial): ‘With the advent of the liberal regime, the utilitarian and mercantilist features that had characterised the colonial administration were replaced by an assimilationist or centralist policy, and the indigenous in our colonies, who until then had had no rights or safeguards, found themselves from one day to the other as Portuguese citizens, with the same rights, exemptions and privileges as the Portuguese citizens in Europe, without distinction of race, colour or religion. These rights were bestowed upon them by Articles 1, 2 and 145 of the Constitutional Charter of 29 April 1826’. Text available at https://dre.pt/application/dir/pdfgratis/1930/07/15600.pdf [01.10.2016] 16 At first, for purely pragmatic reasons, i.e. the colonial administration’s lack of resources; from the late nineteenth century onwards, by reference to principles of international colonial law according to which respect for the legal institutions of native populations was a right of the colonised peoples and a duty for the colonising powers (Silva 2015: 191-200). 17 Law no. 277, of 15 August 1914, available at http://www.fd.unl.pt/anexos/investigacao/1407.pdf [03.10.2016]. 18 The ‘indigenous statute’ (Estatuto do Indigenato) hereby introduced was later confirmed by the 1930 Colonial Act, which ruled that, ‘in the colonies, consideration shall be paid to the stage of evolution of the native peoples, with the adoption of special statutes for the indigenous population, which shall establish, under the influence of Portuguese public and private law, legal regimes that accommodate their individual, domestic and social usages and customs, provided that these are not incompatible with morals and the dictates of humanity’ (Article 22). The Colonial Act was given constitutional dignity by Article 132 of the 1933 Constitution and republished, with slight changes, by Decree-Law no. 22:465, of 11 April 1933; text available at https://www.parlamento.pt/Parlamento/Documents/acto_colonial.pdf [01.10.2016]. 6 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2017/7 - © 2017 Author