By EUDO CITIZENSHIP expert Roxana Barbulescu
 
The conservative government in Spain seeks to fulfil its electoral promise of modifying the rules of residence-based naturalisation in a new bill introduced in Parliament in March 2013. The main novelty of the bill is the introduction of a language test and of an integration test. Besides the fact that the current bill does not provide for the possibility to take the test in a language other than Spanish (such as Basque, Catalan, or Galician), the required level of linguistic skills and the content of the integration test are left unspecified.

In addition, applicants, who under the previous legislation were required to swear an Oath of Allegiance to the King, must also swear an Oath of Loyalty to the Constitution and to the laws of the Spanish state. Furthermore, the oath is no longer to be sworn in front of a civil servant but in the presence of a public notary.

The latter measure is a consequence of the fact that the Civil Registration Office has been unable to process applications in due time, a well-known and long-standing issue in Spain where the number of applicants for naturalisation has risen sharply over the past ten years. These changes will benefit primarily Latino-American nationals whose native language is Spanish, deepening thus the existing gap between two categories of foreign residents. Spanish-speaking Latino-Americans enjoy the dual privilege of a reduced two-years residence requirement combined with a linguistic test in their own language, while other categories of foreign residents (including EU citizens), who already have to document at least ten years of residence, will now face the additional burden of taking a test in a language other than their native one.
 
Read the article in El Diario and El Pais.