Report on Citizenship Law: Mozambique Aside from the gender equality related amendments, Law no. 16/87 added new naturalisation requirements to the list in Article 11, incorporated the reacquisition regime set by Law no. 2/82 as the new Article 16, and made some minor formal adjustments to the text of a couple of other provisions in the Nationality Act. Article 11 (c) now read that applicants for naturalisation had to offer political and moral guarantees of integration into Mozambican society, could not fall under one of the categories in Article 7 (i.e. leading members of colonial-fascist political organisations, officials or informants of foreign political police forces, convicts for crimes against the Mozambican people or decolonisation) nor have been convicted for crime against the security of the people and the Popular State. Differently from the regime set by Law no. 2/82, the new Article 16 (2) set as a general rule that citizenship reacquisition would have the same effects as acquired citizenship, while admitting that the Council of Ministers could determine that the reacquisition produce effects as citizenship by origin when ponderous reasons so required. The changes made to the Nationality Act led to the amendment of the Nationality Regulation by Decree no. 5/88, of 8 April 1988, which added rules for registration of citizenship reacquisition, made minor changes to the wording of some of the provisions (e.g. to ensure gender equality) and to the sequence in the naturalisation procedure, and renumbered Articles 20 to 34. According to the new Article 20, the procedure for reacquisition of Mozambican citizenship under Article 16 of the Nationality Act (i.e. the ‘standard’ reacquisition regime) was the same as for naturalisation, while the procedure for reacquisition of Mozambican citizenship by women who had lost it as a consequence of marriage to foreign men (under Article 20 of the Nationality Act) consisted only in the presentation of either proof that they had not acquired a foreign citizenship or proof that they had acquired a foreign citizenship combined with a declaration renouncing to that foreign citizenship. Questions arose as to who would be competent to decide on the applications for reacquisition under the new regime. Minister of Justice Ussumane Aly Daúto issued a Ministerial Order (Despacho) on 18 September 198843 to provide clarity on the issue. The Order stressed that Article 20 of the Nationality Regulation made a clear distinction between the cases of reacquisition under Article 16 of the Nationality Act and the cases of reacquisition under Article 20 of the Nationality Act. For the first type of cases, Article 14 of the Nationality Regulation was to apply, which meant that the interested party was required to submit an application addressed to the Minister of Interior, that the Central Registry Office would prepare the file and send it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for an opinion, and that the Minister of Interior would then decide on the application. This procedure was not required for the second type of cases, i.e. those of reacquisition of Mozambican citizenship by women who had lost their citizenship as a result of marriage to foreign men. In these cases, the women interested in reacquiring their Mozambican citizenship only had to request it at the Central Registry Office and prove that they either had not acquired a foreign citizenship or that, having acquired a foreign citizenship, they had renounced it. The Central Registry Office would then ex officio register the reacquisition of Mozambican citizenship. 43 Published in the Official Journal on 5 October 1988. RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2019/6 - © 2019 Author 15