Lithuania’s citizenship referendum: what it’s about and what it needs to succeed

Of interest, given the considerations at play with respect to Russia and ethnic Russians:

Under the current restrictive rules, Lithuanians who emigrate and become citizens in other countries automatically lose their Lithuanian passports. With the Lithuanian diaspora having ballooned in recent decades, there has been growing pressure to change the constitution. The referendum on “retaining citizenship” is an attempt to do it.

No ordinary referendum

“Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania is acquired at birth and on other grounds established by law. Except in individual cases provided for by law, no one may be a citizen of the Republic of Lithuania and of another state. The procedure for acquisition and loss of citizenship shall be determined by law,” is the current wording of Article 12 of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania.

It is this article that will be changed if the referendum is successful.

The proposed new wording is: “Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania is acquired at birth and on other grounds and in accordance with the procedure laid down by a constitutional law. The constitutional law shall also determine the grounds and procedure for losing citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania.”

Since Article 12 is part of the first section of the constitution, “The State of Lithuania”, changing it requires that more than half of all eligible voters – around 1.2 million people – not only come to the polls but also say yes. The last attempt to amend the article in 2019 failed because even though the turnout was 53 percent and the “yes” vote stood at 72 percent, this was not enough (because it represented only under 40 percent of the total electorate).

Why would this time be different? The initiators have argued that the first attempt to simply lift the ban on dual citizenship may have spooked some voters. The restriction was put into place to alleviate fears that Lithuania’s sizeable Russian-speaking community (about 5 percent of the population) could get Russian citizenship. To avoid that, the current proposal includes a reference to a constitutional law.

This law, which has already been drafted, specifies which nationalities would be compatible with Lithuanian citizenship. These “friendly countries” are the members of the European Union, the European Economic Area, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and NATO.

Meanwhile, Lithuanian citizens could not retain their citizenship if they were also nationals of Russia or Belarus, the member-states of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, or “any other political, military, economic or other alliances established on the basis of the former USSR”.

Will the constitutional law be passed?

This constitutional law, however, is also a target of the opponents of the amendment. They argue that if the referendum succeeds and Article 12 is amended, there is no guarantee the law will actually be passed in its current form.

A constitutional law is not part of the constitution or a constitutional amendment. It is a completely separate document drafted by the parliament and adopted with a special majority – more than half of all MPs.

The parliament would only vote on the new constitutional law after a successful referendum.

But opponents of the referendum doubt whether the special majority will be easy to achieve or that no one will try to change the law.

The initiators of the referendum, meanwhile, assure that the law will be adopted because all parliamentary parties are in agreement and have no objections to the bill. Recall, they argue, that 111 MPs voted in favour of calling the referendum and none voted against it.

The constitutional law cannot be passed before the referendum because it would simply be deemed in violation of the current constitution. However, to make sure people know what they are voting for, the law has already been registered in the Seimas and is available to all who wish to read it.

Source: Lithuania’s citizenship referendum: what it’s about and what it needs to succeed