Slovenia

Slovenian citizenship is governed by the Citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia Act (Zakon o državljanstvu Republike Slovenije, ZDRS; Official Gazette RS No. 1/91-I of 25 June 1991, official consolidated text ZDRS-UPB2, Official Gazette RS No. 24/07), last amended by ZDRS-E (Official Gazette RS No. 40/17, published 21 July 2017 and in force since 22 July 2017). Slovenia follows the ius sanguinis principle: a child is a citizen by origin under Article 4 if, at the time of birth, both parents are Slovenian citizens (wherever the child is born), if one parent is a Slovenian citizen and the child is born in Slovenia, or if one parent is a Slovenian citizen, the other is unknown, of unknown citizenship or stateless, and the child is born abroad. In these cases citizenship arises automatically at birth and any entry in the register is purely evidentiary, with no deadline.

A child born abroad with one Slovenian and one foreign parent acquires citizenship by origin only through registration (priglasitev): the Slovenian parent must register the child before the child's 18th birthday, or the child must permanently settle in Slovenia with the Slovenian parent before turning 18 (Article 5(1)). Registration is not required where the child would otherwise remain stateless (Article 5(2)). Where the child is already over 14, the child's own consent is a further statutory condition of acquisition under Article 5 (Article 8(1)), and the consular declaration form carries a separate signature box for it. A person who missed that window may still declare himself/herself a citizen between the ages of 18 and 36 (Article 6), provided one parent has been a Slovenian citizen continuously from the person's birth until the declaration (or until that parent's death), and provided the person's own Slovenian citizenship was not lost after age 18 through release, renunciation or deprivation. A person who acquires citizenship under Articles 4, 5, 6, 7 or 9 is classified as a citizen by birth rather than by naturalisation (Article 8(2)); the ministry treats registration as effective ex tunc.

Beyond these birthright routes, three further paths matter for people of Slovenian ancestry. First, a person who believes he/she already is a citizen — typically through the pre-1991 republic citizenship of a parent or earlier ancestor — but is not entered in the register may apply for a declaratory decision establishing citizenship (Article 29). Second, a Slovenian emigrant or a descendant to the fourth degree in the direct line may be naturalised on facilitated terms after one year of actual residence in Slovenia with regulated foreigner status (Article 12(1)). Third, extraordinary naturalisation for "national reasons" under Article 13 allows persons of Slovenian descent — under the implementing decree, an emigrant or descendant to the second degree in the direct line, or a member of the autochthonous Slovenian minority in the neighbouring countries — to naturalise on proof of a personal active tie to Slovenia over several years and at least five years of active involvement in Slovenian societies or organisations abroad; Article 13(1) itself still requires one year of continuous actual residence in Slovenia with regulated foreigner status, and it is Article 13(3) that lifts that requirement (together with the means and tax conditions) for persons covered by Article 2 of the Act on Relations between the Republic of Slovenia and Slovenians Abroad who invoke national reasons. All naturalisation routes under Articles 10, 12 and 13 are discretionary: the competent authority "may, at its own discretion" grant citizenship "if it is in the national interest", so none of them confers an entitlement, unlike the Article 4 to 6 birthright and declaration routes and the Article 29 declaratory decision.

The automatic and declaration routes (Articles 4 to 6) run through a parent only. Claims through grandparents and earlier generations work in one of two ways. Where the chain of citizenship is unbroken — each intermediate ancestor held Slovenian (republic) citizenship and it passed by descent under the law in force at that generation's birth — the descendant may already be a citizen and can seek a declaratory decision under Article 29. The test is not a single one: Article 39 preserves citizenship held under the previous regulations, and the ministry's own determination form states that citizenship is acquired by origin and that a descendant's position is therefore judged by the rules in force at the time of the ancestor's birth. The current thresholds — registration before 18 under Article 5, or a declaration before 36 under Article 6 — apply only to births on or after 25 June 1991, since Articles 5 and 6 did not exist before that date; because the Article 6 declaration must be made before the age of 36, in practice it now reaches only persons born from about 1990 onwards. For earlier generations the applicable rules were materially different, and are set out in the next section. What is constant is that an interruption at any generation — a loss of citizenship, or a failure to satisfy whatever condition the law of the day imposed on a birth abroad — breaks transmission.

Where the chain is broken, the naturalisation routes by origin apply. Article 12(1) reaches a Slovenian emigrant's descendants to the fourth degree in the direct line — that is, down to great-great-grandchildren — but requires one year of actual residence in Slovenia with regulated foreigner status, secured means of subsistence and a certificate of basic-level Slovenian. This generational scope has applied since ZDRS-D (Official Gazette RS No. 127/06, published 7 December 2006 and in force from 22 December 2006), which extended it from the third degree set by ZDRS-C in 1994. Article 13 (national reasons) can dispense with residence altogether for the emigrant class, but the implementing decree limits it to the emigrant and descendants to the second degree in the direct line — children and grandchildren of the emigrant; the amending decree published on 20 March 2013 (in force fifteen days later, on 4 April 2013) narrowed this from the fourth degree, with applications already filed decided under the earlier criteria. A great-grandchild or more remote descendant can still be considered under Article 13 where "exceptional national reasons" exist, meaning an outstanding contribution to Slovenia's social, economic, scientific, cultural or other development and to its international standing.

In all these procedures "degree" (koleno) is counted per generation in the direct line: the emigrant's child is the first degree, the grandchild the second, the great-grandchild the third and the great-great-grandchild the fourth. Counted from the applicant upward, as the ministry's own form puts it, parents are the first degree and grandparents the second.

Whether an ancestor was a Slovenian citizen depends on a succession of regimes. Until 1918, most of present-day Slovenia lay in the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary, where citizenship was governed by the Austrian General Civil Code of 1811 together with the right of domicile in a municipality (Heimatrecht, domovinska pravica); Prekmurje, under Hungarian administration, followed Hungarian citizenship law. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was founded on 1 December 1918, but nationality was reallocated only by the peace treaties, which took effect later: Saint-Germain, signed 10 September 1919, entered into force in July 1920 and Trianon, signed 4 June 1920, a year after that. They provided that a person holding the right of domicile outside Austria and Hungary acquired the nationality of the relevant successor state, subject to rights of option. A unified Yugoslav citizenship act followed in 1928 (Official Gazette of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes No. 254/1928). It rested on ius sanguinis through the father for children born in wedlock and on a strict single-citizenship principle; married women followed their husband's nationality, and the ministry's own determination form still asks about the husband's citizenship for marriages contracted up to 28 August 1945 for exactly that reason.

A large part of Slovene-settled territory was outside Yugoslavia between the wars, and this is the single most common source of error in chain analysis. Under the Treaty of Rapallo of 12 November 1920 the Slovenian Littoral (Primorska) and part of Carniola passed to Italy, and Italian citizenship legislation was in force there from 7 June 1923 until mid-September 1947. Not everyone holding domicile (pertinenza) in that territory automatically became Italian, and rights of option ran in both directions. Only under the Paris Peace Treaty with Italy, in force from September 1947, did persons permanently resident on 10 June 1940 in the territory transferred to Yugoslavia lose Italian citizenship; Yugoslavia enacted the implementing statute in December 1947 (Official Gazette FLRJ No. 104/1947), the Italian-speaking population had a one-year option for Italian citizenship, and a parallel 1947 option for Yugoslav citizenship was opened to emigrants who had left the Littoral before June 1940 and belonged ethnically to one of the Yugoslav nations. The Free Territory of Trieste was divided between Italy and Yugoslavia by the London Memorandum of Understanding of 1954, and the remaining questions were settled by the Osimo agreements of 1975; Article 45 ZDRS still requires a record of persons who opted for Italian citizenship. The practical consequence is that a Slovene who emigrated from Primorska between the wars — a very large share of the Slovene diaspora in Argentina and the United States — was an Italian national at the time, with no Yugoslav or Slovenian citizenship to transmit, so descendants of such emigrants generally belong in the Article 12(1) or Article 13 naturalisation routes rather than the Article 29 declaratory route.

After the Second World War, the federal Citizenship Act (Official Gazette DFJ No. 64/45 and Official Gazette FLRJ Nos. 54/46, 104/47, 88/48 and 105/48 — the string Article 39.a ZDRS still cites) created a two-tier system: every citizen of a People's Republic was simultaneously a citizen of the federation and could be a citizen of only one republic, so acquiring another republic's citizenship meant losing the Slovenian one. An authentic interpretation of its Article 37 was published at Official Gazette FLRJ No. 90/46. Slovenia's republic-level citizenship was regulated by republic acts of 1950 and 1965 and finally by the Citizenship Act of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia (Official Gazette SRS No. 23/76), which Article 47 ZDRS repealed on independence; federal acts of 1964 (Official Gazette SFRJ No. 38/1964) and 1976 (Official Gazette SFRJ No. 58/1976) ran alongside them. Under these laws descent ran through both parents, but it was not unconditional for births abroad: under Article 4(4) of the 1946 federal act a child born abroad whose parents were living abroad with the child acquired citizenship only if the citizen parent registered the child with the competent Yugoslav authority abroad within five years of the birth, unless the law of the country of birth already treated the child as a Yugoslav national, and the 1976 federal act replaced that with registration, or the taking up of permanent residence in Yugoslavia, before the age of 18. There was no equivalent of the present age-36 catch-up declaration. Where the parents held different republic citizenships they designated the child's republic citizenship by agreement — a situation Article 41 ZDRS still addresses today. On independence, Article 39 ZDRS provided that everyone who held citizenship of the Republic of Slovenia and of the SFRY under the previous regulations is a citizen of the Republic of Slovenia, which makes republic citizenship — usually traceable through the citizenship registers and civil registers kept in Slovenia — the key historical fact for descent claims. Article 39.a, inserted by ZDRS-C in 1994, covers a narrow class: persons who on 23 December 1990 had registered permanent residence in Slovenia, or had lived there continuously since, who would have acquired Slovenian citizenship under Article 37 of the federal act but had acquired the citizenship of another republic of the former SFRY by 21 December 1950 without having made the declaration the 1946 authentic interpretation required.

Historical loss events are central to chain analysis. Under the 1928 Kingdom regime, the single-citizenship principle meant loss on voluntary acquisition of a foreign citizenship, and married women generally followed their husbands out of Yugoslav nationality; treaty option rights, including the later arrangements for the Trieste Zone B territory, also moved people in and out of Yugoslav nationality. Under the post-war federal legislation, emigrants could lose citizenship of the People's Republic of Slovenia and of the FPRY by absence (odsotnost) under Article 15 of that act, and that loss extended to their children who had been born abroad and lived permanently abroad in the same position — an automatic interruption running down a generation. Loss by absence was inherited from the earlier Austrian and Yugoslav arrangements and was abolished by the 1964 federal reform; it is no longer part of Slovenian law. A separate federal statute of 1945 (Official Gazette DFJ No. 64/45), as amended in 1946 (Official Gazette FLRJ No. 86/46, the reference the original Article 41 ZDRS used) and repealed in 1962, deprived of citizenship officers and non-commissioned officers of the former Yugoslav army who refused to return, members of military formations who had served the occupier and fled abroad, and persons who fled abroad after the liberation — categories that include much of the post-war political emigration. Loss of Slovenian republic citizenship also occurred through acquisition of another Yugoslav republic's citizenship.

Current law (Article 17 ZDRS) knows four modes of loss: release (odpust), renunciation (odrek), deprivation (odvzem) and loss under an international treaty. Release requires, among other things, that the applicant is 18, actually lives abroad, faces no obstacle arising from military obligations, has settled tax debts and maintenance obligations in Slovenia, faces no pending prosecution, and holds or is assured a foreign citizenship (Article 18); even where every condition is met the authority may refuse release on grounds of security, defence, reciprocity or economic, social and national interest. Renunciation is available only to an adult citizen born and living abroad who holds a foreign citizenship, and only until the age of 25 (Article 25). Deprivation (Article 26) targets dual citizens abroad engaged in activities harmful to Slovenia's interests and is reported to be effectively unused. Crucially, Slovenian law contains no automatic loss when a citizen voluntarily acquires a foreign citizenship.

For descent claims the consequences are straightforward. An ancestor's release, renunciation or deprivation before the next generation's birth breaks the chain, because the ancestor was no longer a citizen when the child was born. For the declaration under Article 6, the Slovenian parent must have remained a citizen without interruption from the applicant's birth to the declaration, and the applicant's own citizenship must not have been lost by release, renunciation or deprivation after the age of 18.

Two restitution-type windows opened at independence and are now closed. Under the original Article 41 ZDRS, persons deprived of citizenship of the People's Republic of Slovenia and the FPRY under the 1945 deprivation statute — broadly, the post-war political emigration — and their children, as well as Slovenian emigrants whose citizenship had lapsed through absence, could acquire citizenship on application within two years of the Act's entry into force. That provision did not simply expire: the Constitutional Court repealed Articles 41 and 13.a by decision U-I-69/92-30 of 10 December 1992, the repeal taking effect on 1 June 1993, because the discretion the provision conferred lacked a statutory standard. Under Article 40, citizens of other Yugoslav republics permanently resident in Slovenia on the plebiscite day of 23 December 1990 and actually living there had six months to apply; the window expired on 25 December 1991, more than 174,000 people applied and 171,125 became citizens. On 26 February 1992 residents from other republics who had not acquired citizenship were removed from the permanent-residence register — the "erased"; 18,305 persons were initially identified and the number was later corrected to 25,671. A transitional provision of the 2002 amendment (ZDRS-Č) reopened, for one year, a citizenship route for adults with registered permanent residence on 23 December 1990 and continuous actual residence since; separate residence-status legislation was adopted in 2010 (Official Gazette RS No. 50/2010, in force 24 July 2010), and a compensation act (Official Gazette RS No. 99/2013) followed the Grand Chamber judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Kurić and Others v. Slovenia of 26 June 2012.

The re-acquisition route in Article 12(2) is frequently misread and reaches fewer people than its name suggests. It is open only to a person who personally held and lost Slovenian citizenship by release or renunciation — under the ZDRS or under the rules that governed citizenship on Slovenian territory before it — and who has then actually lived in Slovenia continuously for six months before applying, with regulated foreigner status. A descendant who never held Slovenian citizenship cannot use it at all. Nor does it cover the communist-era losses described above: deprivation under the 1945 statute and loss by absence are neither release nor renunciation and fall outside Article 12(2) entirely. Descendants of persons who lost citizenship under those rules must therefore use Article 12(1) or Article 13. The Article 13 decree does, separately, allow extraordinary naturalisation for a person of Slovenian origin who was released from Slovenian citizenship for justifiable reasons and now reapplies.

Three further points deserve attention. The registration deadline for children born abroad in mixed marriages is a genuine trap, though the loss is conceptual rather than literal: without registration by 18 or a declaration by 36, citizenship by origin is never acquired in the first place, and naturalisation is then the ordinary remedy. The age-36 limit dates from the 2002 amendment, which raised it from 23. A distinct declaration route survives in the current Article 41 for an adult born in Slovenia, one of whose parents was a Slovenian citizen at the birth but whose parents later agreed on the citizenship of another SFRY republic: that person may declare as a Slovenian citizen until the age of 36, at a Slovenian mission or an administrative unit, without naturalising. Finally, since 22 July 2017 Article 13(2) permits extraordinary naturalisation with no residence and no foreigner status for a person whose exceptional contribution has advanced Slovenia's development and international standing; and the status of "Slovenian without Slovenian citizenship" under the Act on Relations between the Republic of Slovenia and Slovenians Abroad (Official Gazette RS No. 43/06) is a distinct diaspora status that does not itself confer citizenship, although persons covered by Article 2 of that act invoking national reasons are exempt under Article 13(3) from the residence, means and tax-settlement conditions.

Slovenia accepts dual citizenship in all descent and origin-based contexts. A child who is a citizen by origin, including by registration, is never required to give up or later choose against a foreign citizenship, and minors are never asked to renounce. A Slovenian citizen who voluntarily acquires a foreign citizenship does not lose Slovenian citizenship. Within Slovenia, a dual citizen is treated exclusively as a Slovenian citizen unless an international agreement provides otherwise (Article 2).

Release from the previous citizenship is a condition of ordinary naturalisation (Article 10(1), point 2) and, through the cross-references in Article 12, of the spouse route (Article 12(3)) and the route for persons who completed a higher-education programme in Slovenia (Article 12(9)). It is not required of applicants under Article 12(1) (Slovenian emigrants and descendants to the fourth degree), Article 12(2) (re-acquisition after release or renunciation), the routes for refugees, stateless persons and persons born and living in Slovenia since birth, or extraordinary naturalisation under Article 13, where the applicant may keep the existing citizenship. All the exceptions to the release condition sit in Article 10(2): citizens of EU member states are exempt where reciprocity exists, and the remaining exceptions cover statelessness, legal systems under which citizenship is lost by the naturalisation itself, states that refuse release or treat release applications with unreasonable delay, and states that treat voluntary acquisition of a foreign citizenship as a punishable act of disloyalty. Spouses under Article 12(3) may be exempted from the release condition only by a special application approved by the Government.

For a declaration under Article 5 or Article 6 no form is prescribed by statute or rulebook, but Slovenian missions publish and use standard bilingual forms, one for children under 18 and one for adults up to 36, with a closed list of mandatory annexes. These are the applicant's birth certificate bearing an apostille with a Slovenian translation; the parents' marriage certificate, apostilled and translated, where the marriage took place abroad and is not entered in the Slovenian civil register; the record of acknowledgment of paternity where the parents were not married at the birth; the declarant's choice of the personal name to be used in Slovenian legal transactions; the separate written consent of a child aged between 14 and 18; and permanent-address and electoral-roll registration forms. For an adult declaration the applicant's own marriage certificate and documents on any other change of personal status are added, and the Slovenian parent's citizenship must be shown at the applicant's birth and continuously until the declaration.

For a declaratory decision on citizenship, the applicant must establish the ancestor's Slovenian (republic) citizenship, typically through entries in Slovenian civil registers and the former citizenship books, which the administrative unit can verify ex officio in Slovenian registers and archives; the civil-status chain of birth and marriage records for each generation links the applicant to that ancestor. The consular application form asks in addition for the last registered residence in Slovenia of the applicant, the parents or the grandparents, and specifically for their place of residence between 1948 and 1952 — the window in which loss by absence and republic-citizenship allocation are decided — for particulars of relatives in Slovenia or other former-SFRY states, and for any other citizenship evidence such as an old citizenship certificate, passports or military identity documents. Where the narrow Article 39.a route is invoked, paragraphs 2 and 3 of that article place the burden on the applicant to produce evidence of the legal basis on which the entry in the other republic's citizenship book was made, a party's own statement being admissible only exceptionally.

For extraordinary naturalisation on national grounds, the ministry's application form requires: the applicant's birth and marriage certificates; a detailed curriculum vitae; proof of current citizenship or citizenships (passport or certificate); birth register extracts for the parent, grandparent or other ancestor up to the second degree in the direct line through whom Slovenian origin is claimed; where the register entries do not show it directly, other evidence of Slovenian origin or declared Slovenian ethnicity, such as school certificates, employment booklets or baptismal records in which ethnicity was recorded; a certificate, on the prescribed standard form that is a compulsory annex, of at least five years' active involvement in a Slovenian society or emigrant, expatriate or minority organisation abroad; evidence of a personal active tie to Slovenia over several years (correspondence, photographs, public postings, statements of relatives and friends in Slovenia); criminal record certificates from every country of citizenship; and proof of payment of the administrative fee. Where the ancestors were born in Slovenia their extracts need not be attached — precise birth data suffice and the authority obtains the records itself — but a birth evidenced only by a baptismal certificate must be documented by the applicant. Slovenian criminal-record data, tax data and the public-order, security and defence assessments are obtained ex officio. Public documents must be submitted in the original or as officially certified copies, and other annexes must be signed and dated. Foreign public documents must as a rule be legalised under the Act on the Certification of Documents in International Traffic (Official Gazette RS No. 9/17) or bear an apostille under the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961, and foreign-language documents must as a rule carry a certified translation into Slovene, which the General Administrative Procedure Act requires where it is necessary. Two exemptions matter in practice: documents on the international standard forms need no translation, and documents issued under Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 — birth, death, marriage and absence-of-criminal-record certificates among them — require neither legalisation nor translation.

Administrative units (upravne enote) decide on declarations under Articles 5, 6 and 41, on naturalisation under Articles 10, 12 and 14 — their positive decisions going to the Ministry of the Interior and Public Administration for revision and consent — and on declaratory decisions establishing citizenship (Article 29). The ministry itself decides on extraordinary naturalisation under Article 13 (Article 27(1)). Filing channels are narrower than they look. A declaration under Article 5 or 6 may be lodged at any Slovenian diplomatic or consular mission, at an administrative unit or at the ministry, and an Article 41 declaration at a mission or an administrative unit. Naturalisation applications, however, must be lodged at an administrative unit in Slovenia, with only two exceptions: an Article 13 application may also be filed at the ministry or at a mission, and an application for cessation of citizenship may also be filed at a mission (Article 27.a(1)). An Article 12(1) emigrant-descendant application therefore cannot be started at a consulate. For an applicant with no residence in Slovenia, Article 27.a fixes competence in acquisition and cessation procedures by a cascade — last registered residence, then the parents' last registered residence, then the place where the birth is registered, and failing all of these the administrative unit in Ljubljana; for a declaratory decision the competent body is the administrative unit of the person's permanent residence (Article 29), and where a person was a citizen under the previous regulations but was never entered in the register the competent administrative unit issues the decision of its own motion (Article 43).

In the Article 13 national-reasons procedure the sequence is: filing of the application with supporting evidence; the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad forms an opinion on the existence of national reasons under the criteria decree (Official Gazette RS Nos. 41/07, 45/10 and 24/13), obtaining any further information from the competent Slovenian mission through the consular service of the ministry responsible for foreign affairs; the Government of the Republic of Slovenia makes the formal finding of national interest, which binds the ministry (Article 13(4)); the ministry then issues the decision. A minor child of a parent naturalised under Article 13 on national grounds — and only on that ground — is granted citizenship on that parent's request (Article 14(4)), with the child's own consent required from the age of 14 (Article 14(6)). Missions filing Article 13 applications ask the applicant to give a power of attorney for the service of administrative documents, and the ministry warns that an unnotified change of address leads to service by public notice and can end in a refusal or discontinuation, with a fresh application and a fresh fee then required.

Since ZDRS-D (Official Gazette RS No. 127/06), in force from 22 December 2006, every adult naturalisation applicant must swear the statutory oath of respect for the free democratic constitutional order founded in the Constitution (Article 10(1), point 10); children granted citizenship under Article 14 are not subject to it. The ceremony is regulated by a ministerial rulebook (Official Gazette RS No. 42/07), under which an ordinary naturalisation applicant swears before the head of the deciding administrative unit, while a person naturalised under Article 13 who does not actually live in Slovenia swears before the head of the Slovenian mission that received the application — so a diaspora applicant need not travel to Slovenia for it. In procedures decided by administrative units citizenship takes effect on the day the oath is taken (Article 27.b(3)), while in ministry-decided cases it takes effect when the written decision is served (Article 15). A basic-level Slovenian language certificate is required for ordinary naturalisation and for the Article 12(1) emigrant route, but not for a declaration, a declaratory decision, re-acquisition under Article 12(2) or the Article 13 procedure. Successful applicants are entered in the register, can obtain a citizenship certificate from any administrative unit irrespective of residence (Article 44), and thereby become eligible for a Slovenian identity card and passport.

The General Administrative Procedure Act requires a decision within one month of a complete application where no special investigative procedure is needed and within two months where one is; citizenship cases fall under the longer limb, and in practice regularly take longer than it. Where an administrative unit grants naturalisation, a further statutory stage follows: the ministry must complete its revision within two months of receiving the file, extendable by up to two further months if it quashes the decision (Article 27.c). Beyond those statutory anchors nothing is published: the official guidance gives no processing times, and the ministry publishes no case-duration statistics. Reported practice is that declarations and declaratory decisions are resolved within a few months, depending on how much register and archival verification is needed, and that extraordinary naturalisation for national reasons — which passes through the mission, the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad, the Government and the ministry — commonly takes from around six months to well over a year; neither figure rests on an official source.

Official fees under the Administrative Fees Act (Zakon o upravnih taksah) are as follows. Slovenia uses the euro, and consular fees, although set in euro, are collected at the mission in local currency by the payment method that post specifies.

• Naturalisation (Articles 10, 12, 13, 14) filed in Slovenia: €4.50 application fee plus €181.20 for the decision — €185.70 in total (tariff nos. 1 and 12). The decision fee is due even if the application is refused, and a single fee covers members of the same family naturalising together. The same decision fee applies to release from citizenship (Article 18), release of a child (Article 22) and renunciation (Article 25).
• Article 13 naturalisation, or an application for cessation, filed at a diplomatic or consular mission: consular fee of €354.00 (tariff no. 59(1)), payable at the mission instead of the domestic fees, again once for a family applying together.
• Declaratory decision establishing citizenship: €181.20 for the decision plus the €4.50 application fee in Slovenia (tariff nos. 1 and 13); a single consular fee of €181.00 through a mission (tariff no. 59(2)).
• Declaration (priglasitev) at a mission: €19.00 in European countries and €26.00 outside Europe, as the missions publish — the €13.00 general consular application fee plus the transmission fee of €6.00 or €13.00 (tariff nos. 54(1) and 55).
• Declaration filed in Slovenia: the €4.50 general application fee (tariff no. 1). No decision fee is separately tarified for a declaration, but the administrative unit does issue a decision (Article 27(3)), so the general €18.10 fee for decisions carrying no special tariff (tariff no. 3) may be charged in addition; no official page states a total.
• Citizenship certificate through a mission: €19.00 in European countries, €26.00 outside Europe. In Slovenia no application fee is charged for a request for a certificate about facts held in an official register (tariff no. 1, note 2).
• Passport (biometric, 10-year validity, adult) issued through a mission: €115.00, being €109.00 plus a €6.00 application fee (tariff no. 56); at an administrative unit in Slovenia the administrative fee is €13.60 plus €0.50 for the application (tariff no. 14), to which the cost of the booklet is added.
• Costs arising from the oath ceremony — travel of officials, interpreters, witnesses and similar — are charged to the applicant under the oath rulebook. An applicant who does not speak Slovenian swears through an interpreter and pays for that interpreter.

This page is not updated regularly, and it may not reflect the current position. It is a general account of Slovenian 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.