Patrícia Jerónimo primary school.11 As for the registration and documentation of adults, there have been several campaigns over the years, often as a side effect of children birth registration campaigns,12 but the most far-reaching registration procedure is still that of voter registration in preparation for general elections. Starting with the first multi-party elections of 1994, voters without an identity card or a passport have been allowed to register in the electoral rolls, and be issued a voter’s card, based on other documents containing a recent photograph, signature or fingerprint (e.g. work card, military identity card), on recognition by members of the registration brigade, or on the testimony of citizens registered at the same registration centre or of religious or traditional authorities.13 While a source of much needed flexibility, voter registration on the basis of witness testimony is, however, not always reliable, among other reasons because the religious and traditional authorities’ views on citizenship may be at odds with the statutory provisions (Manby 2018b: 4-5; Bakewell 2007: 18). The (un)reliability of the electoral rolls has been a constant point of concern for the Mozambican Constitutional Council (Cistac 2012: 2, 5) and for external election observers over the years. A further reason why recognition as a Mozambican citizen may prove extremely challenging is the confusion surrounding the legal framework in force and the lack of clear implementation guidelines from the central government, which leads to inconsistent practices in the civil registry offices at provincial level (e.g. in the application of witness procedures for the registration of persons without primary documents).14 The confusion in the application of the legal framework is blatant even at the level of the central government, since ministerial decrees granting naturalisation as recently as 201515 make no reference to the relevant provisions in the 2004 Constitution and instead invoke as legal grounds provisions in the 1975 Nationality Act and the 1975 Nationality Regulation which are no longer in force. The 2004 Constitution made significant changes to the citizenship regime, but did not expressly repeal the 1975 Nationality Act nor the 1975 Nationality Regulation, which remain in force to the extent that they do not contradict the constitutional norms. What is to be considered contradictory or merely supplementary has been a matter of contention, particularly in what regards dual citizenship (Manby 2016: 46, 49), which the 2004 Constitution allows, but which still appears as grounds for citizenship deprivation in the 1975 Nationality Act. While it is arguable that many of the questions associated with the interplay between the Constitution and the Nationality Act and Regulation may be easily addressed with recourse to classic hermeneutical tools of the civil law tradition, it would certainly be advisable that the Mozambican legislator should adopt a new Nationality Act to repeal both the 1975 Nationality Act and the 1975 Nationality Regulation, as the UNHCR has been recommending for many years now.16 In July 2012, the Minister of Justice Benvinda Levy announced that a 11 See ‘Governo moçambicano quer atingir 1,4 milhões de registos de nascimento em quatro anos, cit. In its 2018 report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Mozambican Government explained the low levels of registration as being caused by ‘socio-demographic factors, such as the level of education of the parents, cultural barriers, lack of knowledge that registration is free of charge in the first 120 days after the birth, and limitations of resources’. See Combined third and fourth periodic reports submitted by Mozambique under Article 44 of the Convention, cit., § 143. 12 As indicated in the report submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee in 2012, the registration campaigns for children ended up involving also the registration of hundreds of thousands of adults (657,209 between 2005 and 2010), since unregistered parents showed up to the brigades wishing to register their children, and the solution was to register the parents first and then the children. United Nations Human Rights Committee Consideration of Initial Reports from Mozambique, cit., § 137. 13 This solution has been consistently adopted by different Voter Registration Acts over the years, from Law 5/97, of 28 May 1997 [Article 18 (3)] until Law no. 9/2007, of 26 February 2007 [Article 21 (3)]. 14 See UNHCR Fact-sheet ‘Fighting Statelessness’, cit. 15 See e.g. the 3 April 2015 edition of the Boletim da República, I series, no. 27, available at https://lexlink.eu/FileGet.aspx?FileId=1147951 [04.04.2019]. 16 See UNHCR Fact-sheet ‘Fighting Statelessness’, cit. 4 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2019/6 - © 2019 Author