Citizenship
After the adoption of the new Constitution in 1992, a new Citizenship Law recognised the citizenship registrations of the Citizens' Committees as the initial legal registry of Estonian citizens. Citizens of the Soviet Union who had filed applications with the Citizens Committees were enabled to be naturalised on the basis of a simplified procedure. By 1996, a total of 23,326 people - over 38% of those who filed a Citizenship Committee application card - had been naturalised by this procedure. Other noncitizens had to pass exams pertaining to the Estonian language, Estonian history, and the Constitution of the Republic of Estonia in order to be naturalised. Alternatively, Russia being a successor state to the Soviet Union, all former USSR citizens qualified for natural-born citizenship of the Russian Federation, available upon request, as provided by the law “On the RSFSR Citizenship” in force up to 2000.
Read more about this topic: Congress Of Estonia
Famous quotes containing the word citizenship:
“Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS—our inferior one varies with the place.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.”
—O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862–1910)
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)