Albania

Albanian citizenship is governed by Law No. 113/2020 "On Citizenship" (Ligji nr. 113/2020 "Për shtetësinë"), adopted on 29 July 2020 and in force since 14 October 2020, as amended twice: by Law No. 77/2023 of 2 May 2024 (published 6 June 2024, in force 21 June 2024) and by Law No. 49/2026 of 8 May 2026 (published in Fletorja Zyrtare no. 116 of 5 June 2026, in force 20 June 2026). Neither amendment touched the descent provisions. Two descent-based routes exist. Under Article 5, anyone born with at least one parent holding Albanian citizenship at the time of birth acquires Albanian citizenship automatically, wherever the birth takes place; such a person is a citizen by operation of law and needs only to be registered in the Albanian civil register, a right that does not lapse on reaching the age of 18. Under Article 6, a foreign citizen not covered by Article 5 may acquire citizenship "by origin" (me origjinë) on proof of a direct lineal kinship of up to the third degree with an ancestor who held Albanian citizenship — in practice a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent. Article 6(2) imposes only the two conditions in Article 8(1)(dh) and (ë): no final conviction, in the applicant's own state, in Albania or in a third state, for an offence for which Albanian law prescribes at least three years' imprisonment (unless the conviction is shown to have been politically motivated), and no threat to public order or national security. There is no residence period, no language test, no history test and no income requirement. The route is not, however, a wholly remote one: the file is processed by the State Police structure for the applicant's place of residence in Albania, and outside Article 9 cases the oath of allegiance must be sworn before the mayor of an Albanian municipality.

Two further routes matter to people with Albanian roots. A former citizen who renounced Albanian citizenship may resume it under Article 16, which requires the conditions in Article 8(1)(a), (b), (dh) and (ë) — majority, legal capacity, the same criminal-record bar that applies on the origin route, and no threat to public order or national security; the criminal-record condition is dropped from the English translation of Article 16 in general circulation, but it is in the Albanian text. Under the transitional Article 23(2), a person who renounced before 14 October 2020 and has neither kept nor acquired another citizenship re-acquires Albanian citizenship on application, subject only to the public-order and national-security test.

Ordinary naturalisation (Article 8) requires seven years' continuous lawful residence with a permanent residence permit valid at the date of application, adequate housing, sufficient lawful income, spoken and written Albanian and basic Albanian history, and a clean record; since June 2024 citizens of states in which Albanian is an official language are exempt from the language and history test. A stateless person needs only the residence, criminal-record and security conditions (Article 8(2)); a foreign parent of a minor Albanian citizen needs three years' lawful continuous residence and is exempt from the language and history test (Article 8(4)). Since 20 June 2026 spouses no longer naturalise under Article 8: the former Article 8(3) has been repealed and replaced by a free-standing Article 8/a, under which a foreign spouse acquires citizenship four years after a marriage entered in the Albanian civil marriage register with no Albanian residence requirement at all, or three years after the marriage with at least one year's residence in Albania before the application, or two years after the marriage where at least one child has been born of it, subject in each case only to Article 8(1)(dh) and (ë).

For the Article 6 origin route, the anchor ancestor may be at most three degrees removed in the direct line: each generation counts as one degree, so a parent (first degree), grandparent (second degree) or great-grandparent (third degree) can serve as the anchor. Article 2(d) defines "origin" as a direct lineal family link, up to the third degree, between the applicant and an ancestor holding Albanian citizenship. Descent may be traced through either the maternal or the paternal line: Joint Instruction No. 69 of 10 April 2025 requires proof of Albanian origin in the direct line up to three degrees "even through one parent" (qoftë edhe nga njëri prind). A great-great-grandparent or earlier ancestor cannot anchor an Article 6 claim; a person whose nearest Albanian-citizen ancestor is more than three generations back is left with ordinary naturalisation.

Article 6 does not require an unbroken chain of citizenship transmission. What must be proved is that the ancestor held Albanian citizenship and that the family line runs from that ancestor to the applicant, link by link — not that citizenship actually passed at each birth. Claims of unlimited generational depth are possible instead through Article 5, but only where the chain is genuinely unbroken: if each intermediate ascendant was an Albanian citizen at the time of the next generation's birth, every member of the line is a citizen by operation of law and may register at any age, without any decree or discretionary decision. For each link in an Article 5 chain, whether citizenship in fact passed is decided by the transmission rule in force at the date of that birth — the 1929 Civil Code, the 1946 law, the 1954 decree, Law No. 8389/1998 as enacted, or Law No. 8442/1999 onwards — and not by Article 5 of the 2020 law. Claims through a grandparent therefore take one of two forms: registration as a citizen by birth, where the connecting parent was (even unknowingly) an Albanian citizen when the applicant was born, or an Article 6 application, where the intermediate transmission failed.

Whether an ancestor held Albanian citizenship depends on a succession of instruments. Before independence, declared on 28 November 1912, the territory was Ottoman and the Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869 applied. The first definition of the Albanian citizenry came with the Organic Statute of Albania of 10 April 1914: Article 22 recognised as citizens all persons born or settled in Albania before 28 November 1912 who held Ottoman citizenship; Article 23 allowed anyone who qualified to opt for another citizenship within six months of promulgation of the Statute, provided they emigrated; Article 24 allowed persons of Albanian origin residing abroad to claim citizenship on request; and Article 25 extended citizenship to Albanians who moved to Albania after 28 November 1912 from the territories annexed by Serbia, Montenegro and Greece, unless they declared otherwise within six months of promulgation. About half of the Albanian population of the Balkans remained outside the new state, and its members did not become Albanian citizens automatically: they had to settle in Albania under Article 25 or apply from abroad under Article 24. This is a state-succession point that still matters for families from Kosovo, western North Macedonia and northern Greece.

The first full citizenship legislation was a chapter of the Civil Code of the Albanian Kingdom, adopted on 1 April 1929 and modelled on the French and Italian codes. It was patrilineal: a child acquired citizenship where the father was Albanian (Article 4.1), with a separate fallback for children whose parents were unknown or stateless (Article 4.3). There was no maternal transmission, and the Code's marriage rules were gender-asymmetric. During the Second World War, Kosovo and western Macedonia were attached to Albania between 1941 and 1944 and their inhabitants exercised Albanian citizenship rights, but Article 25 of Law No. 377 of 16 December 1946 (published 27 December 1946) ordered the Ministry of Interior to re-examine every acquisition of Albanian citizenship between 7 April 1939 and 29 November 1944, except by women who had acquired it by marriage to an Albanian citizen. Two provisions of the same law preserved large groups: Article 22 presumed persons of Albanian ethnic origin born and educated in Albania to be citizens until the contrary was shown, and Article 27 treated as citizens all Albanian co-ethnics resident in Albania after the war who were registered to vote in the elections of 2 December 1945. The 1946 law also introduced gender equality: either parent transmitted citizenship, and marriage no longer automatically changed a woman's citizenship.

The communist state replaced the 1946 law with Decree No. 1874 of 7 June 1954, a nine-article instrument that left acquisition (Article 3), release (Article 5) and removal (Article 8) to the discretion of the Presidium of the People's Assembly without stated conditions; Articles 2 and 7, dealing with citizens resident abroad, were interpreted by Decree No. 3231 of 20 March 1961. The content of those two provisions is not reproduced in the published literature, so the pre-1998 status of an emigrant family generally has to be established from archival records rather than inferred. The 1954 decree remained in force until Law No. 8389 of 5 August 1998 (in force 4 September 1998), amended by Law No. 8442 of 21 January 1999 (in force 9 March 1999). As enacted, Article 7 of the 1998 law did not transmit citizenship unconditionally: a child born abroad to one Albanian and one foreign-citizen parent became Albanian only if both parents agreed. Unconditional transmission through either parent, regardless of birthplace, dates from Article 1 of the 1999 amendment. A government decision of 3 July 2013 (Decision No. 554) creating a recognition procedure for persons of Albanian origin — expressly excluding citizens of Kosovo — was barely applied in practice and was repealed, together with Law No. 8389, by Article 25 of Law No. 113/2020.

Historical loss rules can break an Article 5 chain. Under the 1929 Civil Code an Albanian woman who married a foreigner retained her citizenship only if the marriage act so provided (Article 15), while a foreign woman married to an Albanian could not hold a citizenship different from her husband's (Article 14); the Code did not tolerate dual citizenship. Law No. 377/1946 recognised five modes of loss: absence (fifteen years' residence abroad without performing any duty to the Albanian state, Article 13), removal (Article 14, aimed at nationals of enemy states, naturalised citizens acting against national interests, and citizens abroad who acted against Albania), release, renunciation and treaty-based loss; absence and removal were used as political instruments. Under the 1954 decree, release and removal were effected by simple discretionary decree with no stated conditions. In the 1990s many emigrants renounced Albanian citizenship in order to naturalise in host states whose laws then demanded it: 4,949 people lost Albanian citizenship between 1992 and 2007, and 2,892 lost it by release between 2015 and 2019.

The guarantee against involuntary loss entered Albanian constitutional law with Article 24 of the 1993 Charter on Fundamental Human Rights and Freedoms and is now Article 19(2) of the Constitution certified on 28 November 1998. Under Article 12 of Law No. 113/2020 citizenship is lost in only two ways: by renunciation on application, and by deprivation. Renunciation (Article 13) requires that the person is at least 18, is resident abroad, will not become stateless, faces no prosecution for offences punishable by five or more years, has no legal obligations to public institutions or to natural or legal persons, and has discharged financial obligations to an Albanian spouse, children or wards; parents may renounce on a child's behalf under Article 14. Deprivation without request (Article 15) is possible only where citizenship was obtained with falsified documents, and then only within ten years of the oath, or — for naturalised citizens only — for membership of or support for organisations whose activity is aimed at undermining national security and the constitutional order, and never where statelessness would result; it is decreed by the President, is appealable to the competent administrative court, and does not extend to the person's children. For today's applicants the practical rule is therefore that post-1998 links in a chain are rarely broken other than by voluntary renunciation, the only involuntary route being the narrow Article 15 deprivation.

Albanian citizenship law contains no dedicated restitution or reparation route for victims of the pre-1944 or communist regimes; descendants of political emigres rely on the ordinary Article 5 and Article 6 routes, on resumption under Article 16, and on the rule in Article 8(1)(dh) that a conviction shown to have been politically motivated does not count against an applicant. Three other special features are worth noting. Decree No. 1654 of 19 April 1953 granted citizenship en masse to the Cham Albanians then resident in Albania after their expulsion from north-western Greece in 1944-45, so their descendants may have an Albanian-citizen anchor — but the decree was keyed to residence in Albania, not to the expulsion itself, and families who went to Turkey, remained in Greece or emigrated onward before 1953 are not covered. There is no deadline for registering a child born abroad to an Albanian citizen: the Article 5 right to be registered never lapses. And Article 9, retitled "Naturalisation for state interest" and rewritten with effect from 20 June 2026, now allows the President to grant citizenship outside the Article 8 conditions on age, language and history knowledge and length of lawful residence where the Albanian state has a "special state interest" (interes të posaçëm shtetëror) in a durable link with the person, given their qualities, abilities and specific useful circumstances or activity; the earlier list of qualifying fields — education, science, art, culture, economy, sport — has been removed. The responsible line minister must identify, support and guarantee that state interest before the President, and applications without that supporting documentation are inadmissible. A minor may be naturalised under Article 9 only with the consent of both parents or the legal guardian and, where the child is aged 14 to 18, of the child (Article 9(3/1)).

Ethnic origin alone does not qualify. Under Law No. 113/2020 "origin" in Article 6 means descent from an ancestor who held Albanian citizenship, not membership of the Albanian ethnic nation, and Article 2(ë) states expressly that Albanian citizenship does not indicate a person's ethnic origin. Ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro or Greece whose ancestors never held Albanian — as opposed to Ottoman or Yugoslav — citizenship therefore have no descent claim, although the 2013-2020 exclusion of Kosovo citizens has disappeared from the books and citizens of Albanian-speaking states now enjoy the language and history exemption in ordinary naturalisation. Since June 2024, Article 7(3) again allows a child born in Albania to lawfully resident foreign parents to acquire citizenship with both parents' consent, restoring a rule that had existed under the 1998 law.

Multiple citizenship is fully permitted on every route. Law No. 113/2020 contains no provision anywhere requiring an applicant — by birth, by origin, by resumption or by naturalisation — to renounce an existing nationality, and the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs states plainly that the law allows other citizenships to be held alongside the Albanian one. Unconditional toleration dates from Article 3 of Law No. 8389 of 5 August 1998 ("an Albanian citizen may also be a citizen of another state"), in force from 4 September 1998, and was the first such rule in Albanian citizenship legislation. Between 1992 — Decree No. 255 of 17 July 1992, approved with one change by Law No. 7613 of 1992, both published in Fletorja Zyrtare no. 6 of 2 December 1992 — and 1998, dual citizenship was allowed only for persons of Albanian nationality or origin acquiring Albanian citizenship. Before 1992 it was effectively excluded: Article 23 of the 1914 Organic Statute ruled it out implicitly, and the 1929 Civil Code did not tolerate it.

Conversely, Albanian citizenship is never lost automatically by acquiring another nationality. Under Article 12 loss occurs only on a renunciation application or by deprivation under Article 15, and renunciation is refused outright where the person would be left stateless (Article 13(1)(b)).

The operative documentation instrument is Joint Instruction No. 69 of the Minister of Interior and the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of 10 April 2025, which repealed Joint Instruction No. 228 of 20 November 2024, itself the successor to Instruction No. 65 of 4 February 2021. For an Article 6 origin application, Section I.1.1 requires: an individual request addressed to the President of the Republic; a birth certificate or birth-act extract; a family certificate, or, for countries that do not issue one, an official document explaining this; a certificate "or any other document" proving the applicant's Albanian origin in the direct line up to three degrees, even through one parent; and a criminal-record certificate issued by the competent authorities of the state of the applicant's other citizenship and/or of any third state where the applicant has lawfully stayed for more than six months. The Albanian judicial-status certificate is obtained ex officio by the administration. In practice the origin document is an Albanian birth or family-register extract, an old Albanian passport or another citizenship record for the ancestor, supported by the birth and marriage certificates that link each generation. The e-Albania checklist for the service additionally asks for four 4x6 cm photographs, which the instruction does not require. The request itself must state the applicant's name, surname, date and place of birth, permanent address, the period of arrival in Albania and the profession exercised abroad and in Albania, and must be signed.

Formal requirements are strict. Documents issued by a foreign administration must be legalised or apostilled according to the regime applicable with the state concerned — Albania is a party to the Hague Apostille Convention — and translated into Albanian, either by a translator in Albania with notarisation there, or abroad with the translation certified at the Albanian diplomatic mission or consular post. Documents issued in Albania need no apostille or foreign-ministry legalisation, but must be signed by the head of the issuing institution and must not be more than six months old. Foreign documents must likewise be no more than six months old, the exceptions being the citizenship-promise document and residence or stay certificates, which are valid for two years; validity is measured to the date the local police directorate or the mission accepts the documents, and the clock starts from the date the applicant pays the fee. Records are accepted only when they are in full agreement with one another, without errors or corrections, so discrepancies in names or dates between generations must be resolved before filing. For registration of a citizen by birth under Article 5, the child's foreign birth certificate, apostilled or legalised and translated, is presented with proof of the parent's Albanian citizenship, identity documents for both parents and, where there is a foreign parent, that parent's notarised consent to the registration. After a successful origin application, the new citizen presents apostilled or legalised and translated personal, family and marriage certificates from the country of origin for entry in the Albanian civil register.

Applications for acquisition, resumption and renunciation are addressed to the President of the Republic and, since the 2024 amendment of Article 17(1), are filed online through the e-Albania platform. Applications for acquisition — including the Article 6 origin route — are lodged only in the Republic of Albania: the originals are sent by post to the State Police commissariat for the applicant's place of residence, which is also the structure that carries out the first verification. Filing for acquisition is strictly personal; a representative acting under a special power of attorney is not accepted, and parents or the legal guardian act only for children under 14. Albanian diplomatic missions and consular posts accept resumption and renunciation applications, which they forward through the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs; that channel now rests on Article 18(2) and on Joint Instruction No. 69/2025 rather than on Article 17(2), which the 2024 amendment turned into a rule-making clause. For renunciation applications filed inside Albania, a representative with a special power of attorney is permitted. There is no language test, no interview and no renunciation of another nationality on the origin route.

The procedure then runs as follows. Where the online file is complete, the local State Police structure notifies the applicant within five working days of acceptance and of the service fee, which is paid and sent by post with the originals; the police carry out public-security checks and forward the file to the Ministry of Interior within one month of the application (Article 18(1)). The Ministry's citizenship structure runs verifications with the State Intelligence Service and the General Directorate of the State Police, examines the file within six months and, if the conditions are met, proposes a decree to the President (Article 18(3)); an incomplete file is returned within 45 days, with 15 days for notification (Article 18(4)). A refusal takes the form of an administrative act of the Minister and, under Article 19/1, is appealable to the Administrative Court of First Instance in Tirana. The President issues the decree within 60 days of the proposal and it is published in Fletorja Zyrtare (Article 20). The decree takes effect only once the person swears an oath of allegiance before the mayor of the municipality of residence or an official authorised by the mayor, within six months (Article 22(1) runs that period from notification of the decree, while Joint Instruction No. 69/2025 runs it from publication in the Official Gazette, and oath dates are set by public announcement for Mondays); the period may be extended by up to twelve months for objective reasons, and only Article 9 grantees may take the oath at a consulate. After the oath the person is entered in the National Civil Status Register and can apply for an Albanian identity card and biometric passport. Citizens by birth under Article 5 follow a different, non-discretionary path: the birth is simply registered in the civil register — abroad through a consulate, in Albania at the municipal civil-status office — with no decree and no oath.

The statutory deadlines add up to roughly nine months for a decree on an origin application: one month at the State Police, six months at the Ministry of Interior and 60 days at the President's office, plus the time to schedule and take the oath and complete civil registration. The e-Albania service page gives six months as the service time. These are outer limits rather than averages, the file also has to clear the intelligence and police verifications, and no processing statistics are published for Article 6 cases, so durations should be planned rather than predicted. Consular registration of a child born abroad is stated to take three months from the submission of complete documents; an adult born abroad to an Albanian citizen registers instead through the civil-status offices under the civil-status legislation, for which no service time is published. Passports and identity cards are produced in Albania and take up to six weeks when ordered through a consulate.

Governmental fees only, with approximate euro values at the Bank of Albania rate of about 93 lekë to the euro (21 August 2026). The service fee for an application to acquire, resume or renounce citizenship filed in Albania is 10,000 lekë (about EUR 108) under Joint Instruction No. 271 of the Minister of Interior and the Minister of Finance and Economy of 1 July 2021; the e-Albania portal displays the charge with VAT added, at 12,000 lekë (about EUR 130). The fee falls due only after the police accept the online file. Resumption and renunciation applications filed at a consulate cost EUR 30 each, or the equivalent in local currency. Registration of a child born abroad carries no service fee, although a separate consular translation-certification fee applies where the translation was made abroad. After acquisition, a biometric passport applied for in Albania costs 7,500 lekë (about EUR 81), or 18,000 lekë (about EUR 195) under the expedited procedure, and an identity card 1,500 lekë (about EUR 16), or 3,000 lekë (about EUR 32) expedited. At consulates the official tariff for a biometric passport is EUR 130 in Greece and Italy, EUR 170 in Brussels, Munich, Austria, Sweden, France and Turkey, GBP 144 in the United Kingdom and USD 240 in the United States and Canada; the consular identity-card fee is EUR 12 in Greece and Italy, EUR 16 in Brussels, Germany, Austria, Sweden, France and Turkey, GBP 13 in the United Kingdom and USD 18 in the United States and Canada.

This page is not updated regularly, and it may not reflect the current position. It is a general account of Albanian citizenship law: statutes are amended, time limits expire, and the practice of the competent authorities moves without the legislation moving with it. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is an assessment of your own family’s position.

Whether there is a claim in your case turns on names, dates and documents that no general page can take into account. The questionnaire is where we ask about them, and a lawyer in our citizenship team reads the answers.