According to the Spanish Immigration Law, 1 year is the maximum that the administration should take to resolve a nationality file by residence. However, the deadlines are not being met for many reasons. In 2018, about 400,000 applicants were living with a pending decision.

On the other hand, the statistics also registered a strong increase in 2016 (150,944 applications), however the fall in 2017 of the applications was a minimum never before observed in the last 4 years.

The answer to this discrepancy is found in current immigration regulations. The Ministry of Justice of Spain requires, through civil registries, to grant citizenship to those residents who apply for citizenship if they accumulate at least 10 years of residence in Spain legally and in a continuous manner. However, there are exceptions that reduce this time, for example: if you are a refugee, 5 years; for nationals of Latin American countries 2 years and 1 year for those who were born in Spain or have a father, mother, grandfather and / or grandmother of Spanish origin, as well as for those who have been in marriage with someone of Spanish origin for a minimum year .

On the other hand, taking into account the foreign population resident in each community at the beginning of 2017, a follow-up of the data indicated that, in addition to Madrid and Catalonia, the Basque Country had also intensified to a greater extent the number of applications.

We submitted the application for Spanish nationality of Sikander Hayat on 10/18/2017, with the intention of obtaining the resolution faster than 2-3 years.

How our Service Helped?

An INE report published in June 2018, showed us a progressive growth of migrants who arrived in the country between 2013 and 2017. "The foreign population that immigrated from other countries increased by 29% compared to 2016," the text said.

The statistics of the INE also showed that approximately 50% of the applications were minors of fathers or mothers of foreign origin and that they were born in Spain: of the 66,498 residents in Spain who acquired Spanish nationality in 2017, 22.7 % (15,120) were children between 0 and 9 years old, and 21.3% (14,164) were between 10 and 19 years old.

In response to an issue raised in the Congress of Deputies, the Government of Spain recognized that, at that time, work was being done on the resolution of the files presented in 2015.

We helped Sikander Hayat with the preparation and presentation of the citizenship application to the Spanish authorities. But in addition, with the purpose of not waiting 2-3 years to obtain the resolution and accelerating the resolution of his citizenship file as much as possible, we proposed him to file a contentious appeal before the National Court.

Results Obtained

This appeal before the National Court can be filed 1 year after the request, and in this case, Sikander Hayat filed exactly 1 year and 13 days after applying for nationality, and thanks to this, we were able to obtain a favorable resolution of nationality 4 months and 8 days after filing the appeal at the National Court.

This allowed Sikander Hayat:

• Forget periodic renewal of your temporary residence authorization.
• To be able to begin to consider the regrouping of their relatives who were still residing in the country of origin.
• Apply for jobs in Spain that require having Spanish nationality.
• Think about the idea of ​​traveling to other countries of the European Union to work for a while or visit the United States (taking into account that Spaniards do not need a visa to enter the United States).

If we had not filed the appeal, the client would have waited at least 2 or 3 more years until he received a positive response to his Spanish citizenship.