2026-10-10Finding
Twenty-seven parliaments answer the ancestry question, and they are not all answering the same one
Every guide to European ancestry treats the question as one question with twenty-seven answers: how far back can your ancestor be. Read the statutes and there are three different questions underneath, the member states are split unevenly between them, and which one a state answers decides what you actually get. How far back is the part that matters least.
A reader with a European grandparent wants to know one thing: does the grandparent reach. Every aggregator answers it as a table of generations, because a table of generations is the shape the question arrives in. This corpus now holds the ancestry record of all twenty-seven member states, each quoted from the statute that carries it, and the table of generations turns out to be the least useful thing in it.
The useful thing is which statute answers at all. In ten of the twenty-seven, descent is a ground of residence: it is written into the aliens act, beside work and study, and it gets you a permit. In fourteen others the aliens act has nothing to say about it and the answer sits in the nationality act, where descent does not get you a permit because it gets you the passport instead, or gets you nothing at all. The remaining three each do something of their own: Spain a visa to come and look for work, France a ten-year card for one generation running in both directions and not for a grandchild, and Hungary the only one that puts descent in the aliens act without making it a way in.
Those two halves are not interchangeable and a reader who treats them as one list will plan the wrong thing. A Polish great-grandparent gets permanent residence and a wait before citizenship. A Portuguese grandparent gets Portuguese nationality by origin, which is not naturalisation and asks for no residence at all. The Polish ancestor is two generations further back and the Portuguese outcome is incomparably stronger, and no table of degrees shows that.
Where the answer lives, and what that costs you
The states that make descent a residence purpose are Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The states where the aliens act is silent and the answer, if there is one, sits in the nationality act are Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.
Estonia is worth pulling out of that second list, because it looks like it belongs in the first and does not. Section 118 of the Välismaalaste seadus lists nine grounds for a residence permit and ancestry is not among them. What a grandparent buys is a place outside the immigration quota under section 115, which is a different and much narrower thing: it removes a ceiling rather than creating an entitlement, and the applicant still needs one of the nine grounds. The word the quota provision turns on, eestlane, is not defined anywhere in the Act.
The line is close to a geography but not identical to one, and the apparent exceptions are the interesting ones. Czechia has no residence route by descent and does not need one: its nationality act lets a grandchild of a former Czech or Czechoslovak citizen acquire citizenship by declaration, with no residence, no language test and no deadline. Sweden is the mirror image. Descent reaches a Swedish child at birth and never afterwards: chapter 5 of the aliens act has no ancestry ground and the citizenship act has no claim for a grandchild, so a Swedish grandparent is worth nothing at all to an adult.
Hungary is the third shape and it is worth naming, because it looks like the first and behaves like neither. None of the twenty-four purposes in section 6(1) of Act XC of 2023 is descent, so a person with a Hungarian grandparent arrives on the same footing as anyone else and has to find a purpose like everybody. But section 83(1)(d) then waives the three years of lawful residence that settled status otherwise costs. Descent is not a way into Hungary. It is a way to stay, once you are there by some other means.
How far back is the question that matters least
The reaches run from one generation to none at all, and they do not line up with the value of what they give.
Poland reaches furthest in the residence half: one parent or grandparent, or two great-grandparents, of Polish nationality, and article 195(1)(3) of the aliens act grants permanent residence for an indefinite period without a temporary permit first. Slovakia reaches a great-grandparent in the nationality act and prices that route at thirty euros where the ethnic certificate route costs five hundred and sixty. Bulgaria asks only that at least one ascendant is a Bulgarian, with no degree stated for residence and the third degree for naturalisation. Croatia states no degree at all and substitutes a date: the ancestor must have left before 8 October 1991.
At the other end, Belgium stops at a parent, and a parent born abroad has five years from the birth to claim it or the line ends. Sweden stops at birth. Estonia recognises a grandparent for one purpose only, which is a place outside the immigration quota, and not for a permit.
Four states make descent the easiest route they have
In most of the corpus an ancestry route is a route like any other with one condition waived. In four it is the path of least resistance in the whole statute.
Slovakia cuts the grounds on which the application can be refused from fifteen to six, and the general ground - that the applicant does not meet the conditions - is one of the nine removed. Croatia excuses the applicant from proving means of support and from proving health insurance, two of the five conditions every other permit carries, and gives the right to work and to be self-employed with no permit at all. Romania waives five of the seven conditions for long-term residence: the five years of prior residence, the means, the health insurance, the accommodation and the Romanian language test, leaving only national security and public order. Bulgaria puts foreigners of Bulgarian origin at the head of the list of people who may be granted permanent residence, with no qualifying period of any kind.
Lithuania goes further than any of them in one respect: article 53(1) issues a permanent residence permit to a person of Lithuanian descent outright, with no prior residence, and article 26(2) disapplies the health insurance, the means, the housing undertaking and the travel history together.
Three doors moved inside eighteen months, and one of them opens into the future
This is not a settled area of law and three member states moved in it between March 2025 and December 2025.
Italy closed the widest descent route in Europe and closed it backwards. Article 3-bis provides that a person born abroad who holds another citizenship is considered never to have acquired Italian citizenship, and it says that of people already born, with a cut-off at 23:59 Rome time on 27 March 2025. Four limbs survive and a great-grandparent is outside every one of them.
Luxembourg's route for a descendant of an ancestor who was Luxembourgish on 1 January 1900 had to be claimed by declaration before 31 December 2025. The date has passed.
Croatia moved the other way. Article 79.a was inserted into the aliens act with effect from 15 March 2025 and built an entire route where none had existed, for an emigrant, a family member of one, a descendant of one, or a family member of a descendant.
Malta moved a door that has not closed yet. Article 4 of the Maltese Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2025 substituted 1 August 2028 for the dates that previously bounded the chain, and the rule those dates serve is in article 5(6): from that day, where a parent in the line was born on or after it, that parent must themselves have registered before the child can be entitled. A family that has not kept the chain alive loses it, generation by generation, from a date three years ahead. Italy closed its route backwards; Malta has published the day its own will start closing forwards.
The trap is where the clock starts
Ireland is the clearest case in the corpus of a route that reads as generous and has a condition inside it that most readers meet too late.
A person born outside the island of Ireland is an Irish citizen from birth if a parent was Irish at the time. Where that parent was also born abroad, the grandchild is not a citizen unless the birth is entered in the foreign births register - and for anyone registered after 1 July 1986, citizenship begins on the date of registration, not at birth. The consequence is the one nobody plans for: a great-grandparent reaches you only if your parent registered before you were born. A family that discovers the route in one generation cannot apply it to the next retrospectively.
Portugal has the same shape without the trap. A grandparent in the second degree of the direct line makes a person Portuguese by origin, on a declaration and on showing ties of effective connection to the national community - and what that connection means is not defined in the article.
Cyprus bounds the same kind of claim by a window rather than by a generation. Article 109(3) of the Civil Registry Law reaches a person descended from someone born in Cyprus between 5 November 1914 and 16 August 1960 while their parents were ordinarily resident there - the span from the annexation to independence. No degree of descent is stated, and no residence is required; what is required is that an ancestor was born inside those forty-six years.
What this rests on
Twenty-four of the Union's twenty-seven. Cyprus, Hungary and Malta are not written yet, and nothing here should be read as a statement about them.
Every sentence above is a reading of a statute. What several of these routes actually turn on is a document an agency issues and the statute does not describe: Croatia names a certificate of the ministry for demography and emigration and says nothing about what it takes, Romania uses the term 'origine romana' in five places and defines it in none, Estonia leaves 'eestlane' undefined, and Portugal does not define effective connection. Those are the gates, and they are outside the texts.
No figures appear here except the two Slovak fees and the dates, because the rest sit in instruments that were not read. A rule is published in preference to a number we would have to derive.
The split between residence and nationality is a statement about where each state wrote the answer, not about which is better. A nationality route that asks for nothing can still be slower in practice than a residence permit, and nothing here measures practice.
What the instruments say
«jest osobą o polskim pochodzeniu i zamierza osiedlić się na terytorium Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na stałe, lub»Permanent residence, for an indefinite period, on Polish origin and an intention to settle. The furthest reach in the residence half of the corpus.
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The Chancellery of the Sejm's statute collection. The same corpus is served at three addresses and they do not behave alike. isap.sejm.gov.pl is the public web front end; dziennikustaw.gov.pl, run by the Rządowe Centrum Legislacji, serves the Dziennik Ustaw as published; and api.sejm.gov.pl/eli is a machine interface over the same material, giving each act an ELI of the form DU/YYYY/N with its status, its entry into force, its repeal date, the acts that amended it, the consolidated texts announced for it, and the amendments made after each of those. Every act is served in up to four editions: O, the text as published in the Dziennik; T, the announced consolidated text; and U, the Chancellery's own tekst ujednolicony, which carries every amendment and prints on every page the date it was generated and, at its head, the list of Dziennik positions it was built from. The U edition also marks pending amendments in the body: words still in force are in square brackets and the wording that will replace them is in angle brackets, with a marginal note naming the amending Act and its commencement.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **isap.sejm.gov.pl cannot be read by this project at all, and it fails without saying so.** A request for a document page answers HTTP 200 with an Imperva interstitial headed "Pardon Our Interruption"; a request for a PDF answers HTTP 200 with `Content-Type: application/pdf` and an Incapsula JavaScript challenge in the body, so a naive client stores an HTML page under a .pdf name and a PDF tool reports the file as corrupt rather than as blocked. The same documents come back intact from api.sejm.gov.pl, which is why every citation here uses that address. The tekst ujednolicony is the Chancellery's own consolidation and is not an official text; the Dziennik Ustaw as published governs. Its angle-bracket marking cannot be relied on to say what is in force today: the consolidation of the Ustawa o kierujących pojazdami generated on 1 October 2026 still marks a change to article 11(1)(5) as taking effect on 3 September 2026. It may not be cited for the amounts in instruments that delegate them - the Ustawa o pomocy społecznej prints 461 and 316 złoty with a footnote saying the current figures are announced by the minister - nor for anything the Chancellery does not publish: the district lists of occupations closed to work permits are kept in a register under article 31(6) of the 2025 employment Act and are not here, and ministerial announcements under article 9(7) of the social assistance Act are published in Monitor Polski.
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«Разрешение за постоянно пребиваване могат да получат чужденците: 1. (изм. - ДВ, бр. 9 от 2011 г.) от български произход;»The first item on the list of people who may be granted permanent residence, and three words long.
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Bulgaria's foreign ministry, which issues visas and publishes consolidated prints of the statutes it applies. Its copy at /upload/148163/ is the consolidated Закон за чужденците в Република България with the June 2025 Schengen amendment incorporated, extracted cleanly by pdftotext, and it is the text almost every Bulgarian residence record here quotes.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: Not an official text. Bulgaria has no official consolidation and this is a ministry's own working print, whose currency can only be judged from the amendment list in its header - which at /upload/148163/ runs to ДВ бр. 52 от 2025 г. and is already one amendment behind the Ministry of the Interior's copy. The ministry also keeps an older print at /upload/138160/, consolidated only to ДВ бр. 79 от 2024 г.; the two sit on the same site with nothing to say which is current. It must not be cited for anything the foreign ministry does not administer.
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«Policajný útvar môže žiadosť o udelenie prechodného pobytu štátneho príslušníka tretej krajiny, ktorý má postavenie Slováka žijúceho v zahraničí, zamietnuť iba z dôvodov uvedených v odseku 6 písm. a), b), d) až f) a h).»Our translation - not official
The police department may refuse an application for temporary residence of a third-country national who has the status of a Slovak living abroad only on the grounds listed in paragraph 6, points (a), (b), (d) to (f) and (h).
The grounds of refusal cut from fifteen to six. The general ground, that the applicant does not meet the conditions, is among the nine removed.
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The Slovak state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of Justice, which publishes the Zbierka zákonov Slovenskej republiky and keeps every instrument as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same corpus and they behave differently. www.slov-lex.sk is the live portal: a legacy address such as /pravne-predpisy/SK/ZZ/2011/404/ answers HTTP 301 to redir.slov-lex.sk and again to /ezbierky/pravne-predpisy/SK/ZZ/2011/404/, which is an application page. static.slov-lex.sk is a complete static mirror at predictable addresses and is the one to read: /static/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/ is the version history, /static/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/{YYYYMMDD}.html is the version in force from that date, and /static/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/{YYYYMMDD}.print.html is the same text without the navigation. The third is the PDF, at /pdf/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/ZZ_{year}_{number}_{YYYYMMDD}.pdf, and for an instrument of any age it is the one with legal force: each version's header prints either Obsah dokumentu je právne záväzný or, for older instruments, Obsah tohto dokumentu má informatívny charakter, and the HTML page says in terms that its content is informative and that the legally binding content is in the PDF. Version dates are the date the version took effect, so finding the text in force on a given day means reading the history page rather than guessing an address.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The HTML and the PDF are two manifestations of one document and only one of them can be quoted at length.** The static HTML is captured with the portal's own copy-to-clipboard icons between every block, which survive extraction as image markdown; a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary therefore carries exclamation marks the publisher never wrote, and in the residence Act that is every lettered list. The PDF has no such furniture and extracts as clean single-column text, but it breaks a sentence wherever a footnote block or a running header falls: section 20(2) of Act No. 404/2011 Z. z., section 27(1) of the same Act and section 7(3) of Act No. 40/1993 Z. z. are each cut in half by a footnote, and section 23a(1)(e) of Act No. 5/2004 Z. z. is cut by a page break with the forty-hour limit on one page and the eighty-hour limit on the next. A quotation has to be taken from whichever side of the break its sentence survives on and cut short rather than stitched. **The informative-versus-binding line is not where its age suggests.** The PDF of Vyhláška No. 499/2011 Z. z. prints Obsah tohto dokumentu má informatívny charakter on its own first page, so for that instrument neither manifestation is the promulgated text. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the register of occupations with a labour shortage by region, kept under section 12(ad) of Act No. 5/2004 Z. z. by the Central Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family; the annexes to Government Regulation No. 521/2021 Z. z., which the portal serves as separate downloads rather than as part of the text; how much of that regulation's ceiling of 3,000 national visas remains at any moment, which nothing requires anyone to publish; the business plan template the Ministry of Economy publishes under section 32(5)(a) of Act No. 404/2011 Z. z.; and the practice of the Office for Slovaks Living Abroad in assessing national consciousness under Act No. 474/2005 Z. z. It is also not the place to read a figure that an opatrenie moves: Act No. 601/2003 Z. z. still prints 178.92 EUR in its own section 2(a), and the amount in force is in the ministerial measure, which is a separate instrument with its own address.
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«(3) Državljanin treće zemlje iz stavaka 1. i 2. ovoga članka uz zahtjev za odobrenje privremenog boravka ne mora prilagati dokaz o osiguranim sredstvima za uzdržavanje i dokaz o zdravstvenom osiguranju.»Our translation - not official
(3) A third-country national under paragraphs 1 and 2 of this article is not obliged to attach to the application for temporary residence proof of secured means of support or proof of health insurance.
Two of the five conditions every other Croatian permit carries, excused by name.
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Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.
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«(2) Străinilor de origine română, străinilor aflaţi în situaţiile prevăzute la art. 131 alin. (6) posesori ai unui permis de şedere eliberat potrivit prevederilor art. 131 alin. (4), precum şi celor a căror şedere este în interesul statului român li se poate acorda dreptul de şedere pe termen lung fără îndeplinirea condiţiilor prevăzute la alin. (1) lit. a)- e).»Our translation - not official
Foreigners of Romanian origin, foreigners in the situations provided for in article 131(6) holding a residence permit issued under article 131(4), and those whose stay is in the interest of the Romanian state, may be granted the right of long-term residence without meeting the conditions laid down in paragraph (1)(a) to (e).
Long-term residence without the five years, the means, the insurance, the accommodation or the language test.
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The Romanian immigration authority, a structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, created by Emergency Ordinance 55/2007 out of the Authority for Foreigners and the National Office for Refugees. It administers the regime of foreigners and decides visas, residence extensions and long-term residence. Its Legislaţie page is also, in practice, the most reliable public source of the immigration statutes themselves: it serves consolidated PDFs of Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 on the regime of foreigners, Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 on free movement of Union, EEA and Swiss citizens, Ordinance 25/2014 on employment and secondment, Emergency Ordinance 32/2026 on access to the labour market, Law 122/2006 on asylum and the implementing decisions, at stable wp-content/uploads addresses. These are the only consolidated Romanian immigration texts reachable from outside the country, because the Ministry of Justice's legislative portal answers nothing.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It is not the publisher of record and the files say so. Every consolidated PDF it serves is produced by S.C. Centrul Teritorial de Calcul Electronic S.A. Piatra-Neamţ and carries that company's disclaimer above the first article: the content belongs exclusively to CTCE and is not a document of an official character, being intended for the information of users. The official text is the Monitorul Oficial al României, Partea I, issue cited in each amendment annotation. Each file also prints a validity window with an end date, and the Inspectorate does not replace the file when the window closes: the Emergency Ordinance 194/2002 copy read on 10 October 2026 states its validity as running from 27 April 2026 until 30 April 2026, and the Emergency Ordinance 102/2005 copy states 8 to 14 March 2024. It cannot be cited for anything outside the regime of foreigners - not for tax, not for health insurance, not for road traffic, not for citizenship, which is the National Citizenship Authority's - and it cannot be cited for administrative practice: fee schedules, the Shortage Occupations List and the annual labour contingent are ministerial orders and Government decisions published elsewhere.
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«Leidimas nuolat gyventi gali būti išduodamas užsieniečiui, jeigu: 1 ) jis turi teisę atkurti Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybę Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybės įstatymo nustatyta tvarka; 2 ) jis yra lietuvių kilmės asmuo;»Our translation - not official
A permanent residence permit may be issued for an alien if: 1) he has the right to restore citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania under the procedure laid down by the Law on Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania; 2) he is a person of Lithuanian descent;
A permanent residence permit issued outright, with no prior residence.
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The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
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«In deroga agli articoli 1, 2, 3, 14 e 20 della presente legge, all' articolo 5 della legge 21 aprile 1983, n. 123 , agli articoli 1 , 2 , 7 , 10 , 12 e 19 della legge 13 giugno 1912, n. 555 , nonche' agli articoli 4 , 5 , 7 , 8 e 9 del codice civile approvato con regio decreto 25 giugno 1865, n. 2358 , e' considerato non avere mai acquistato la cittadinanza italiana chi e' nato all'estero anche prima della data di entrata in vigore del presente articolo ed e' in possesso di altra cittadinanza, salvo che ricorra una delle seguenti condizioni: a) lo stato di cittadino dell'interessato e' riconosciuto, nel rispetto della normativa applicabile al 27 marzo 2025, a seguito di domanda, corredata della necessaria documentazione, presentata all'ufficio consolare o al sindaco competenti non oltre le 23:59, ora di Roma, della medesima data; a-bis) ((lo stato di cittadino dell'interessato e' riconosciuto, nel rispetto della normativa applicabile al 27 marzo 2025, a seguito di domanda, corredata della necessaria documentazione, presentata all'ufficio consolare o al sindaco competenti nel giorno indicato da appuntamento comunicato all'interessato dall'ufficio competente entro le 23:59, ora di Roma, della medesima data del 27 marzo 2025)) ; b) lo stato di cittadino dell'interessato e' accertato giudizialmente, nel rispetto della normativa applicabile al 27 marzo 2025, a seguito di domanda giudiziale presentata non oltre le 23:59, ora di Roma, della medesima data; c) ((un ascendente di primo o di secondo grado possiede, o possedeva al momento della morte, esclusivamente la cittadinanza italiana)) ; d) ((un genitore o adottante e' stato residente in Italia per almeno due anni continuativi successivamente all'acquisto della cittadinanza italiana e prima della data di nascita o di adozione del figlio»The article that ended descent without limit, and did it of people already born.
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The Italian state's portal for legislation in force. It shows each article as currently amended, with an explicit testo in vigore dal date, and links the amending instruments.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It gives the text and not its interpretation. Article 3-bis reads clearly and has still generated years of litigation over what it means, which is why the Constitutional Court is watched alongside it. A consolidated text can also lag a very recent amendment.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«(2) The F66 [ birth outside the island of Ireland ] of a person deriving citizenship through a father or mother F66 [ so born ] may be registered, in accordance with the foreign births regulations, either in any foreign births entry book or in the foreign births register, at the option of the person registering the birth.»Registration is what makes the grandchild a citizen, and for anyone registered after 1 July 1986 citizenship begins on that date rather than at birth.
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Administrative consolidations of Irish Acts, prepared by the Law Reform Commission under the Law Reform Commission Act 1975. Each revised Act prints the date it is updated to, the latest Act and statutory instrument considered in its preparation, and annotations after every section recording which instrument inserted, substituted or deleted each passage, with the commencement date and the commencing order.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The Commission states on every page that it assumes no responsibility and gives no guarantees as to accuracy or completeness; a revised Act is an administrative consolidation, not an official text, and where it differs from the Acts it consolidates the Acts prevail. Its revision date is a cut-off: an amendment commenced after it is not in the text. The editorial apparatus is inside the sentences - F-markers, square brackets and ellipses sit between words - so a quotation cannot be taken across one, and the annotations and editorial notes are the Commission's own writing rather than anything enacted. Coverage is partial: there is no revised text of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 or of the Aliens Act 1935, and the Commission revises Acts only, never statutory instruments.
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«São portugueses de origem: a) Os filhos de mãe portuguesa ou de pai português nascidos no território português; b) Os filhos de mãe portuguesa ou de pai português nascidos no estrangeiro se o progenitor português aí se encontrar ao serviço do Estado português; c) Os filhos de mãe portuguesa ou de pai português nascidos no estrangeiro se tiverem o seu nascimento inscrito no registo civil português ou se declararem que querem ser portugueses; d) Os indivíduos com, pelo menos, um ascendente de nacionalidade portuguesa originária do 2.º grau na linha reta que não tenha perdido essa nacionalidade, se declararem que querem ser portugueses e possuírem laços de efetiva ligação à comunidade nacional; e) Os indivíduos nascidos no território português, filhos de estrangeiros, se pelo menos um dos progenitores também aqui tiver nascido e aqui tiver residência, independentemente de título, ao tempo do nascimento; f) Os indivíduos nascidos no território português, filhos de estrangeiros que não se encontrem ao serviço do respetivo Estado, se declararem que querem ser portugueses, desde que, no momento do nascimento, um dos progenitores resida legalmente no território português há pelo menos cinco anos; g) Os indivíduos nascidos no território português e que não possuam outra nacionalidade.»Nationality by origin rather than naturalisation: no residence is asked for anywhere in the article.
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The Lisbon public prosecutor's legal database, which has carried consolidated Portuguese statutes in plain HTML for two decades. Each statute is served at a stable numeric address with its full amendment history at the head of the page, named act by act and dated.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: Not the official gazette and not the authentic text: the Diário da República publishes that, and where the two differ the gazette governs. The consolidation is the office's own editorial work and the page does not say who made it or when it was last revised - only which amending acts it claims to carry. The site is served as ISO-8859-1 with the charset in a meta tag, so a fetch that assumes UTF-8 destroys every accented letter.
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«A Magyarországon történő huzamos tartózkodás céljából nemzeti tartózkodási kártyát – a (3) bekezdésben foglalt kivétellel – az a harmadik országbeli állampolgár kaphat, aki tartózkodási engedéllyel, ideiglenes letelepedési engedéllyel vagy ideiglenes tartózkodási kártyával rendelkezik, és a) a kérelem benyújtását közvetlenül megelőzően legalább három éven át jogszerűen és megszakítás nélkül Magyarország területén tartózkodott, b) a kérelem benyújtását közvetlenül megelőzően legalább egy éve eltartott felmenőként családi életközösségben él magyar állampolgárral vagy huzamos tartózkodási jogosultsággal rendelkező, illetve menekültként elismert harmadik országbeli állampolgárral, c) magyar állampolgár, huzamos tartózkodási jogosultsággal rendelkező, illetve menekültként elismert harmadik országbeli állampolgár házastársa, feltéve, hogy a házasságot már a kérelem benyújtását megelőzően legalább két éve megkötötték, d) magyar állampolgár volt, de állampolgársága megszűnt, illetve a felmenője magyar állampolgár vagy magyar állampolgár volt, vagy e) huzamos tartózkodási jogosultsággal rendelkező, illetve menekültként elismert harmadik országbeli állampolgár kiskorú gyermeke.»Our translation - not official
For the purpose of long-term stay in Hungary a national residence card - with the exception set out in paragraph (3) - may be granted to a third-country national who holds a residence permit, a temporary settlement permit or a temporary residence card, and a) stayed lawfully and without interruption in the territory of Hungary for at least three years immediately before the submission of the application, b) has for at least one year immediately before the submission of the application lived in family union, as a dependent ascendant, with a Hungarian citizen or with a third-country national holding long-term residence entitlement or recognised as a refugee, c) is the spouse of a Hungarian citizen, of a third-country national holding long-term residence entitlement or of one recognised as a refugee, provided that the marriage was concluded at least two years before the submission of the application, d) was a Hungarian citizen but whose citizenship has ceased, or whose ascendant is or was a Hungarian citizen, or e) is the minor child of a third-country national holding long-term residence entitlement or recognised as a refugee.
Known to be out of date. The National Legislation Database dates this time-state 2026. 10. 01. - 2026. 12. 31., which on its own definition in section 1 of Government Decree No 338/2011. (XII. 29.) means the text changes on 1 January 2027. The instrument that changes it was not read.
A waiver of the three years that settled status otherwise costs. Hungary is the only member state that puts descent in the aliens act without making it a way in.
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The Hungarian state's own electronic collection of legislation, operated for the Minister of Justice by Magyar Kozlony Lap- es Konyvkiado Kft. under a public service contract, and the only place a consolidated Hungarian statute is published at all. Section 29(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 defines it; Government Decree No 338/2011. (XII. 29.) sets the duties. Section 2(1) of the decree requires every statute in force to appear in consolidated form with all of its past time-states back to 1 January 2010 and its next three; section 2(3) requires the consolidation within three working days of promulgation. **Read the host carefully: section 8(1) of the decree still names www.njt.hu and the service that answers is njt.jog.gov.hu.** The address shape is njt.jog.gov.hu/jogszabaly/{YEAR}-{NUMBER}-00-00 for an Act, using the Act's Roman numeral converted to Arabic - Act XC of 2023 is 2023-90-00-00, Act LV of 1993 is 1993-55-00-00, Act CXVII of 1995 is 1995-117-00-00 - and njt.jog.gov.hu/jogszabaly/{YEAR}-{NUMBER}-20-22 for a government decree, so Government Decree No 35/2024. (II. 29.) is 2024-35-20-22. The decisive thing on every page is the line under the title: Hatalyos: 2026. 10. 01. - 2026. 12. 31. By the definition of a time-state in section 1 of the decree, the closing date is the day before the text changes, so a page with a closing date is telling the reader that the law will be different on the day after it, and Nem ismert means no change is yet scheduled. Footnotes at the foot of the text name, for every amended paragraph, the Act or decree that put the current words there, which is the only machine-readable amendment history in the corpus.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **Nothing published here is the authentic text and Hungarian law says so in terms.** Section 25(1) of Act CXXX of 2010 confers authenticity on the Magyar Kozlony and section 25(2) forbids a consolidated text from being published in the Magyar Kozlony at all, so the authentic text and the current text are in two different places by design and the consolidation is never the authentic one. Neither Act CXXX of 2010 nor Government Decree No 338/2011. (XII. 29.) uses the word hiteles of this database anywhere. The practical limitation that follows is narrower than it sounds and bites hard in one place: **an amending provision disappears from here once it has done its work.** Section 12(2) of Act CXXX of 2010 makes an amending provision lose force the day after it takes effect, and the consolidated text of the amending Act then prints only a footnote saying so, stripping the subtitle headings with it. Act XC of 2023 as served here therefore contains neither section 350 nor section 351, the two provisions that repealed the statute it replaced; Act LXXXIV of 2024 as served here contains neither section 135, which removed the 500,000 EUR property option from the guest investor programme, nor the subtitle that would say which commencement date applied to it. **For what was enacted, and for when, read the Magyar Kozlony issue.** It also cannot be cited for anything kept outside the statute book, and the 2023 immigration Act pushes a great deal out there: the government decree naming which nationalities may hold a guest worker permit or a National Card, the ministerial communication fixing the annual permit number under sections 28(4) and 30(4), the communication listing excluded occupations, the communication fixing the EU Blue Card salary under section 48(7) of Government Decree No 35/2024. (II. 29.), and the registers of preferential employers and qualified temporary-work agencies. Nor is it the place to read a figure a statute re-indexes: section 25(3) of Act CXXX of 2019 prints a health service contribution of 7,710 forints set in 2020 and in the same breath provides that the rate in force is published each year by the National Tax and Customs Administration on its own website.
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«(6) Where any of the parents of a person applying to be registered as a citizen of Malta by virtue of subarticle (3) was born on or after 1st August 2028 (for the purposes of this article referred to as "the relevant parent") and the relevant parent is also a descendant in the direct line of an ascendant born in Malta of a parent likewise born in Malta, such person shall not be entitled to be registered as a citizen of Malta by virtue of subarticle (3) unless the relevant parent had at any time acquired Maltese citizenship M A LT E S E CIT I ZE NSHIP [ CAP. 188. 7 under this article.»The chain rule the 2028 date serves: from that day a parent born on or after it must themselves have registered before the child is entitled.
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The Government of Malta's statute book, published on the internet by the Minister responsible for the Law Commission under article 12 of the Statute Law Revision Act, 2021 (Act XL of 2021). It carries the Constitution, every Chapter of the revised edition with amendments incorporated, every piece of subsidiary legislation under them, and Acts and Legal Notices as enacted. Addresses follow a stable ELI shape: /eli/cap/<n>/<lang>/pdf for a Chapter, /eli/sl/<chapter>.<n>/<lang>/pdf for subsidiary legislation, /eli/act/<year>/<n>/<lang>/pdf and /eli/ln/<year>/<n>/<lang>/pdf for instruments as made, and /eli/const/<lang>/pdf for the Constitution. Both official languages are served at the same address with eng or mlt substituted. Article 12(4) of the 2021 Act gives the text on this site a statutory presumption: unless proof is brought to the contrary it is deemed to be a true representation of the law, incorporating all amendments up to the date indicated on the site.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It is not the authentic text. Under article 10(2) of the Statute Law Revision Act, 2021 the authentic text is the revised edition itself, which is the sole and only proper text in all Courts of Justice; the internet publication carries only the rebuttable presumption in article 12(4), so the site is official but defeasible. Two consequences follow for citation. First, the presumption runs only up to the date indicated on the site, and that date appears on the HTML page rather than inside the PDF, so a PDF taken on its own states no cut-off and none should be invented for it. Second, where the Maltese and English texts conflict the Maltese prevails - article 74 of the Constitution for any law, article 10(3) of the 2021 Act for a revised edition - so an English quotation here is the subordinate text and should not be relied on against a Maltese one. It cannot be cited for administrative practice at all: who may apply, what documents are wanted and what a programme currently charges in processing terms are matters for Identita, the Residency Malta Agency and the Commissioner for Revenue, and the instruments repeatedly delegate them to guidelines those bodies may issue.
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«(3) Πρόσωπο που γεννήθηκε κατά ή μετά τη 16η Αυγούστου 1960 και κατάγεται από πρόσωπο το οποίο- (α) Κατέστη Βρετανός υπήκοος με βάση τα περί Προσαρτήσεως της Κύπρου Διατάγματα εν Συμβουλίω του 1914 μέχρι 1943· ή (β) γεννήθηκε στην Κύπρο μεταξύ της 5ης Νοεμβρίου 1914 και της 16ης Αυγούστου 1960, καθ όν χρόνον οι γονείς του διέμεναν συνήθως στην Κύπρο, δικαιούται εφόσον είναι ενήλικας και πλήρους ικανότητας και υποβάλει αίτηση στον Υπουργό κατά τον καθορισμένο τρόπο και αφού δώσει επίσημη διαβεβαίωση πίστης στη Δημοκρατία, σύμφωνα με τον τύπο που εκτίθεται στο Δεύτερο Πίνακα, να εγγραφεί ως πολίτης της Δημοκρατίας.»Our translation - not official
(3) A person born on or after 16 August 1960 who is descended from a person who - (a) Became a British subject under the Cyprus (Annexation) Orders in Council 1914 to 1943; or (b) was born in Cyprus between 5 November 1914 and 16 August 1960, at a time when his parents were ordinarily resident in Cyprus, is entitled, provided he is an adult of full capacity and submits an application to the Minister in the prescribed manner and after taking the formal oath of allegiance to the Republic in the form set out in the Second Schedule, to be registered as a citizen of the Republic.
Descent bounded by a window rather than by a generation: birth in Cyprus between the annexation and independence, with the parents ordinarily resident there.
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The legal-information service of the Cyprus Bar Association at https://www.cylaw.org/, and in practice the only place a consolidated Cypriot statute can be read. Each Act has an address of the form /nomoi/enop/non-ind/<year>_<part>_<number>/full.html - the Income Tax Law 118(I)/2002 at /2002_1_118/full.html, the Civil Registry Law 141(I)/2002 at /2002_1_141/full.html, the General Healthcare System Law 89(I)/2001 at /2001_1_89/full.html, the Driving Licence Law 94(I)/2001 at /2001_1_94/full.html, the research-and-studies Law 7(I)/2019 at /2019_1_7/full.html, the payment accounts Law 64(I)/2017 at /2017_1_64/full.html. Every page opens with an Ιστορικό Τροποποιήσεων listing each amending Act in order, and each provision is followed by the Acts that made it, so the amendment chain is readable rather than inferred. The consolidations are materially more current than the state's own: the Income Tax Law here carries amendments to 67(I)/2026 where the Tax Department's PDF stops at 219(I)/2025. The pages are served in a non-Unicode encoding that a plain client renders as mojibake; the project's fetcher handles it and the stored text is clean Greek.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **It is not a government publisher.** It is the Bar Association's service, it carries no statement of authority, it states no cut-off date for any consolidation, and nothing on it has legal force - the authentic text is the printed Official Gazette, as the Office of the Law Commissioner's own editions say. It must therefore never be the only source behind a topic: every Cyprus record that quotes it also carries a government source. It cannot be cited as proof that a provision is in force, only as the best available reading of what it now says, and a figure taken from it that contradicts a government publication has to be reported as a contradiction rather than resolved in its favour. It is worth noting who relies on it anyway: the Health Insurance Organisation, a statutory body of the Republic, links its own readers here for the consolidated text of the General Healthcare System Laws.
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- consolidatesUstawa o cudzoziemcach, Chancellery of the Sejm consolidated text
Internetowy System Aktów Prawnych / ELI service, Kancelaria Sejmu · consolidated to 2026-04-07
Known to be out of date. The Chancellery's consolidation prints two versions of several provisions: the words in force in square brackets and, in angle brackets, wording that takes effect later, with a marginal note naming the amending Act. Everything quoted here is taken from the text in force.
About this source
The Chancellery of the Sejm's statute collection. The same corpus is served at three addresses and they do not behave alike. isap.sejm.gov.pl is the public web front end; dziennikustaw.gov.pl, run by the Rządowe Centrum Legislacji, serves the Dziennik Ustaw as published; and api.sejm.gov.pl/eli is a machine interface over the same material, giving each act an ELI of the form DU/YYYY/N with its status, its entry into force, its repeal date, the acts that amended it, the consolidated texts announced for it, and the amendments made after each of those. Every act is served in up to four editions: O, the text as published in the Dziennik; T, the announced consolidated text; and U, the Chancellery's own tekst ujednolicony, which carries every amendment and prints on every page the date it was generated and, at its head, the list of Dziennik positions it was built from. The U edition also marks pending amendments in the body: words still in force are in square brackets and the wording that will replace them is in angle brackets, with a marginal note naming the amending Act and its commencement.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **isap.sejm.gov.pl cannot be read by this project at all, and it fails without saying so.** A request for a document page answers HTTP 200 with an Imperva interstitial headed "Pardon Our Interruption"; a request for a PDF answers HTTP 200 with `Content-Type: application/pdf` and an Incapsula JavaScript challenge in the body, so a naive client stores an HTML page under a .pdf name and a PDF tool reports the file as corrupt rather than as blocked. The same documents come back intact from api.sejm.gov.pl, which is why every citation here uses that address. The tekst ujednolicony is the Chancellery's own consolidation and is not an official text; the Dziennik Ustaw as published governs. Its angle-bracket marking cannot be relied on to say what is in force today: the consolidation of the Ustawa o kierujących pojazdami generated on 1 October 2026 still marks a change to article 11(1)(5) as taking effect on 3 September 2026. It may not be cited for the amounts in instruments that delegate them - the Ustawa o pomocy społecznej prints 461 and 316 złoty with a footnote saying the current figures are announced by the minister - nor for anything the Chancellery does not publish: the district lists of occupations closed to work permits are kept in a register under article 31(6) of the 2025 employment Act and are not here, and ministerial announcements under article 9(7) of the social assistance Act are published in Monitor Polski.
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- consolidatesLegge 91/1992, articolo 3-bis
Normattiva, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri
About this source
The Italian state's portal for legislation in force. It shows each article as currently amended, with an explicit testo in vigore dal date, and links the amending instruments.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It gives the text and not its interpretation. Article 3-bis reads clearly and has still generated years of litigation over what it means, which is why the Constitutional Court is watched alongside it. A consolidated text can also lag a very recent amendment.
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- consolidatesZákon č. 404/2011 Z. z. o pobyte cudzincov a o zmene a doplnení niektorých zákonov
Slov-lex, Ministerstvo spravodlivosti Slovenskej republiky · consolidated to 2026-10-01
About this source
The Slovak state's own legal information system, run by the Ministry of Justice, which publishes the Zbierka zákonov Slovenskej republiky and keeps every instrument as a series of point-in-time versions. Three addresses serve the same corpus and they behave differently. www.slov-lex.sk is the live portal: a legacy address such as /pravne-predpisy/SK/ZZ/2011/404/ answers HTTP 301 to redir.slov-lex.sk and again to /ezbierky/pravne-predpisy/SK/ZZ/2011/404/, which is an application page. static.slov-lex.sk is a complete static mirror at predictable addresses and is the one to read: /static/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/ is the version history, /static/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/{YYYYMMDD}.html is the version in force from that date, and /static/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/{YYYYMMDD}.print.html is the same text without the navigation. The third is the PDF, at /pdf/SK/ZZ/{year}/{number}/ZZ_{year}_{number}_{YYYYMMDD}.pdf, and for an instrument of any age it is the one with legal force: each version's header prints either Obsah dokumentu je právne záväzný or, for older instruments, Obsah tohto dokumentu má informatívny charakter, and the HTML page says in terms that its content is informative and that the legally binding content is in the PDF. Version dates are the date the version took effect, so finding the text in force on a given day means reading the history page rather than guessing an address.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The HTML and the PDF are two manifestations of one document and only one of them can be quoted at length.** The static HTML is captured with the portal's own copy-to-clipboard icons between every block, which survive extraction as image markdown; a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary therefore carries exclamation marks the publisher never wrote, and in the residence Act that is every lettered list. The PDF has no such furniture and extracts as clean single-column text, but it breaks a sentence wherever a footnote block or a running header falls: section 20(2) of Act No. 404/2011 Z. z., section 27(1) of the same Act and section 7(3) of Act No. 40/1993 Z. z. are each cut in half by a footnote, and section 23a(1)(e) of Act No. 5/2004 Z. z. is cut by a page break with the forty-hour limit on one page and the eighty-hour limit on the next. A quotation has to be taken from whichever side of the break its sentence survives on and cut short rather than stitched. **The informative-versus-binding line is not where its age suggests.** The PDF of Vyhláška No. 499/2011 Z. z. prints Obsah tohto dokumentu má informatívny charakter on its own first page, so for that instrument neither manifestation is the promulgated text. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the register of occupations with a labour shortage by region, kept under section 12(ad) of Act No. 5/2004 Z. z. by the Central Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family; the annexes to Government Regulation No. 521/2021 Z. z., which the portal serves as separate downloads rather than as part of the text; how much of that regulation's ceiling of 3,000 national visas remains at any moment, which nothing requires anyone to publish; the business plan template the Ministry of Economy publishes under section 32(5)(a) of Act No. 404/2011 Z. z.; and the practice of the Office for Slovaks Living Abroad in assessing national consciousness under Act No. 474/2005 Z. z. It is also not the place to read a figure that an opatrenie moves: Act No. 601/2003 Z. z. still prints 178.92 EUR in its own section 2(a), and the amount in force is in the ministerial measure, which is a separate instrument with its own address.
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