NextSpring

Eight Years and an Examination for a Stranger; For the Descendant of an Emigrant, No Residence, No Language and No Renunciation

Answer

The general rule applies to you

No exception is recorded for citizens of El Salvador on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.

154 exceptions recorded across 56 countries · none match El Salvador to Croatia · Becoming a citizen

Ordinary naturalisation in Croatia is among the slower routes in the Union. Article 8(1) of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu asks for eight continuous years of registered residence and the status of a foreigner on permanent residence, release from the former citizenship, knowledge of Croatian, the Latin script, Croatian culture and the social order, and respect for the legal order with public dues paid and no security obstacle. The eight years came in 2011 and replaced five. Beside it sits article 11, which is unlike anything else in the corpus: an emigrant and their descendants may naturalise while exempt from points 2 to 4 - the renunciation, the eight years of residence and the language examination alike - leaving only the age and the good-conduct test. The reach is the point. The 1991 text said "an emigrant and his descendants" with no limit; NN 130/2011 cut it back to descendants within the third degree in the direct line and took away the language exemption; NN 102/2019 removed the degree limit again and restored the exemption, while adding a date: the emigrant must have left the territory of Croatia before 8 October 1991 intending to live permanently abroad. A separate route, article 16, reaches a member of the Croatian people who has never lived in Croatia at all, on proof of belonging and the good-conduct test alone.

Verified with official sourceMonitor - can change2026-10-10

At a glance

Ordinary residence requirement
8 years of registered residence, with permanent residence status

Article 8(1) point 3 of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu as substituted by article 2 of NN 130/2011. The 1991 text asked for five years.

Language examination
Croatian, the Latin script, Croatian culture and the social order

Article 8(1) point 4 of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu as amended by article 2 of NN 130/2011, which added culture and the social order to the language.

Exemption from the examination
Over 60

Article 8(5) of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu, added by article 2 of NN 130/2011.

Dual citizenship
Allowed, but a Croatian citizen with another nationality is treated as Croatian only before Croatian authorities

Article 2 of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu. Release from the former citizenship is still a condition of ordinary naturalisation under article 8(1) point 2.

Descendant of an emigrant
Exempt from the residence, the renunciation and the language examination alike

Article 11(1) of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu as substituted by article 5 of NN 102/2019, which exempts points 2 to 4 of article 8(1).

How far the descent reaches
No limit in the provision

Article 11(1) as substituted by article 5 of NN 102/2019. The third-degree limit that NN 130/2011 had imposed was removed.

Who counts as an emigrant
Someone who left Croatia before 8 October 1991 intending to live permanently abroad

Article 11(3) of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu as substituted by article 5 of NN 102/2019.

Member of the Croatian people living abroad
May naturalise with no residence in Croatia

Article 16 of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu as substituted by article 9 of NN 130/2011, on the good-conduct test of article 8(1) point 5 and proof of belonging.

Born abroad to a Croatian parent
Register before turning 21

Article 5(1) of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu as substituted by article 2 of NN 102/2019; this is acquisition by descent and not naturalisation.

Requirements

  • For ordinary naturalisation: eight continuous years of registered residence and permanent residence status
  • Release from your existing citizenship, or a declaration where the state will not release you
  • Knowledge of Croatian, the Latin script, Croatian culture and the social order - unless you are over 60
  • Respect for the legal order, public dues paid, and no security obstacle
  • For a descendant of an emigrant who left before 8 October 1991: only the age and the good-conduct test

Country-level policy

A Certificate From One Ministry Opens a Residence Permit, a Work Exemption, Permanent Residence and a Place on the Croatian Side of the Employer Ratio

Since 15 March 2025 a single document issued by the ministry competent for demography and emigration does four separate jobs in Croatian immigration law, and the Zakon o strancima does not say what it takes to obtain one. It proves entitlement to temporary residence for the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community under article 79.a, which carries no means test and no insurance test. It lets the holder be employed or self-employed with no residence and work permit. After three continuous years it opens permanent residence under article 156(1) point 2. And since 4 June 2026 it does something for the holder's employer as well: article 99(13) counts the holder among the employer's Croatian workers for the ratio that decides whether anybody else can be hired from outside the Union. The statute names the ministry, names the four classes of person the certificate may describe - an emigrant, a family member, a descendant, a family member of a descendant - and leaves everything else to administration.

Croatia Has Two Settled Statuses and Only One of Them Asks You to Learn Croatian

Most countries have one permanent residence. Croatia has two, they sit in adjoining chapters of the Zakon o strancima, and the difference between them decides whether a person ever has to sit a Croatian examination. Dugotrajni boravak, the Union long-term residence of Directive 2003/109, is reached after five continuous years of temporary residence and asks for a travel document, means of support, health insurance, no danger to public order - and knowledge of Croatian and the Latin script. Stalni boravak, the national permanent residence, is not open to everybody: article 156(1) lists the eight classes who may ask for it, among them the spouse of a Croatian citizen after four years, a returning Croatian emigrant or their descendant after three, and a graduate after five of which three were a degree. For those people article 157(4) asks for a valid foreign travel document and that the applicant not be a danger to public order, national security or public health, and nothing else at all. The language examination has fee-paying providers and its own exemptions - preschool children, anyone schooled in Croatia, and anyone over 65 who is not in work - but the simpler fact is that the people the state most wants back never meet it.

What applies to you

Nothing changes for a citizen of El Salvador

We have no rule recorded that treats your citizenship differently here, so the general rule above is the one that applies to you. That is an answer, not a gap.

What the law says

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 2., kojim se mijenja članak 8. stavak 1. točka 3. Zakona
«da živi u Republici Hrvatskoj s prijavljenim boravkom 8 godina neprekidno do podnošenja zahtjeva i ima odobren status stranca na stalnom boravku;»

Our translation - not official

that he lives in the Republic of Croatia with registered residence for 8 continuous years up to the lodging of the application and has the approved status of a foreigner on permanent residence;

Eight years and permanent residence, together. The 1991 Act asked only for five years of registered stay.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 2., kojim se u članak 8. Zakona dodaje stavak 5.
«Osobe starije od 60 godina ne moraju ispunjavati pretpostavke iz stavka 1. točke 4. ovoga članka.»

Our translation - not official

Persons older than 60 years do not have to meet the conditions of paragraph 1 point 4 of this article.

The examination falls away with age, which is unusual and is not advertised.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 3., kojim se mijenja članak 8. stavak 1. točka 5. Zakona
«da poštuje pravni poredak Republike Hrvatske, da je podmirio dospjela javna davanja te da ne postoje sigurnosne zapreke za njegov primitak u hrvatsko državljanstvo.»

Our translation - not official

that he respects the legal order of the Republic of Croatia, that he has settled the public dues that have fallen due and that there are no security obstacles to his admission to Croatian citizenship.

The good-conduct condition as it now reads. The 1991 text asked instead that the applicant's conduct showed he respected the legal order and customs and accepted Croatian culture.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 11.
«Iseljenik kao i njegovi potomci mogu prirođenjem steći hrvatsko državljanstvo iako ne udovoljavaju pretpostavkama iz članka 8. stavka 1. točaka 1-4. ovoga zakona.»

Our translation - not official

An emigrant and his descendants may acquire Croatian citizenship by naturalisation even though they do not meet the conditions of article 8(1) points 1 to 4 of this Act.

The 1991 original, with no limit on the degree of descent and no date. The publisher's text of the adjoining article 10 prints the typo "članks" for "članka" and it is left as published.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 5., kojim se mijenja članak 11. Zakona
«Iseljenik, njegovi potomci do 3. stupnja srodstva u ravnoj liniji i njihovi bračni drugovi mogu prirođenjem steći hrvatsko državljanstvo iako ne udovoljavaju pretpostavkama iz članka 8. stavka 1. točke 1., 2. i 3. ovoga Zakona.»

Our translation - not official

An emigrant, his descendants up to the 3rd degree of kinship in the direct line and their spouses may acquire Croatian citizenship by naturalisation even though they do not meet the conditions of article 8(1) points 1, 2 and 3 of this Act.

The narrowing of 2012: three degrees, and the language examination put back by the omission of point 4 from the exemption.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 5., kojim se mijenja članak 11. stavak 1. Zakona
«Iseljenik i njegovi potomci mogu prirođenjem steći hrvatsko državljanstvo iako ne udovoljavaju pretpostavkama iz članka 8. stavka 1. točaka 2. – 4. ovoga Zakona.»

Our translation - not official

An emigrant and his descendants may acquire Croatian citizenship by naturalisation even though they do not meet the conditions of article 8(1) points 2 to 4 of this Act.

The provision in force since 1 January 2020. The degree limit is gone and the language exemption is back.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 5., kojim se mijenja članak 11. stavak 3. Zakona
«Iseljenik iz stavka 1. ovoga članka je osoba koja se prije 8. listopada 1991. godine iselila s područja Republike Hrvatske u namjeri da u inozemstvu stalno živi.»

Our translation - not official

The emigrant under paragraph 1 of this article is a person who, before 8 October 1991, emigrated from the territory of the Republic of Croatia with the intention of living permanently abroad.

The date that replaced the degree limit. It is the day the 1991 Act came into force.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 5., kojim se mijenja članak 11. stavak 4. Zakona
«Iznimno, iseljenik iz stavka 1. ovoga članka je i pripadnik hrvatskog naroda koji se iselio s prostora u sastavu bivših država u kojima se, u vrijeme iseljenja, nalazilo i područje današnje Republike Hrvatske.»

Our translation - not official

By way of exception, the emigrant under paragraph 1 of this article is also a member of the Croatian people who emigrated from areas within former states in which, at the time of emigration, the territory of today's Republic of Croatia was also situated.

The clause that reaches people who left before Croatia existed as a state.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 5., kojim se mijenja članak 11. stavak 5. Zakona
«Iseljenikom se ne smatra osoba koja je iselila s područja Republike Hrvatske na temelju međunarodnog ugovora ili se odrekla hrvatskog državljanstva, osoba koja je promijenila prebivalište u druge države koje su u to vrijeme bile u sastavu državne zajednice kojoj je pripadala i Republika Hrvatska te osoba koja je iselila s područja Republike Hrvatske, a nije imala bivše hrvatsko republičko državljanstvo, odnosno zavičajnost na području Republike Hrvatske.»

Our translation - not official

A person who emigrated from the territory of the Republic of Croatia on the basis of an international treaty or renounced Croatian citizenship, a person who changed residence to other states that were at that time within the state community to which the Republic of Croatia also belonged, and a person who emigrated from the territory of the Republic of Croatia and did not have the former Croatian republic citizenship or domicile right on the territory of the Republic of Croatia, are not considered emigrants.

Three exclusions, and the second is the one that matters most: moving inside the former Yugoslavia was not emigration.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 9., kojim se mijenja članak 16. Zakona
«Pripadnik hrvatskog naroda koji nema prebivalište u Republici Hrvatskoj, može steći hrvatsko državljanstvo ako udovoljava pretpostavkama iz članka 8. stavka 1. točke 5. ovoga Zakona.»

Our translation - not official

A member of the Croatian people who does not have residence in the Republic of Croatia may acquire Croatian citizenship if he meets the conditions of article 8(1) point 5 of this Act.

A second route with no residence condition, and resting only on the good-conduct test.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 9., kojim se mijenja članak 16. Zakona
«Pripadnost hrvatskom narodu utvrđuje se ranijim deklariranjem te pripadnosti u pravnom prometu, navođenjem te pripadnosti u pojedinim javnim ispravama, zaštitom prava i promicanjem interesa hrvatskog naroda i aktivnim sudjelovanjem u hrvatskim kulturnim, znanstvenim i sportskim udrugama u inozemstvu.»

Our translation - not official

Belonging to the Croatian people is established by earlier declaration of that belonging in legal transactions, by stating that belonging in particular public documents, by the protection of rights and the promotion of the interests of the Croatian people and by active participation in Croatian cultural, scientific and sporting associations abroad.

How the belonging is proved: a list of behaviours rather than a document. NN 102/2019 added a third paragraph excusing a person whose parents' belonging has been established beyond dispute.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 2.
«Državljanin Republike Hrvatske koji ima i strano državljanstvo, smatra se pred tijelima državne vlasti Republike Hrvatske isključivo hrvatskim državljaninom.»

Our translation - not official

A citizen of the Republic of Croatia who also has a foreign citizenship is considered, before the bodies of state authority of the Republic of Croatia, exclusively a Croatian citizen.

The Act neither forbids nor acknowledges a second nationality; it simply refuses to see it.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 2., kojim se mijenja članak 5. Zakona
«Podrijetlom stječe hrvatsko državljanstvo osoba rođena u inozemstvu, čiji je jedan roditelj u trenutku njezina rođenja hrvatski državljanin, ako do navršene 21. godine života bude prijavljena u diplomatskoj misiji ili konzularnom uredu Republike Hrvatske u inozemstvu ili u matičnom uredu u Republici Hrvatskoj radi upisa u evidenciju kao hrvatski državljanin.»

Our translation - not official

A person born abroad, one of whose parents is a Croatian citizen at the moment of her birth, acquires Croatian citizenship by descent if, before reaching 21 years of age, she is registered at a diplomatic mission or consular office of the Republic of Croatia abroad or at a registry office in the Republic of Croatia for entry in the register as a Croatian citizen.

Descent, not naturalisation, and with a deadline. The transitional window for those already over 21 was two years from 1 January 2020 and NN 138/2021 made it three, so it closed on 1 January 2023.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o izmjenama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu · Članak 1.
«U Zakonu o hrvatskom državljanstvu (»Narodne novine«, br. 53/91., 70/91. – ispravak, 28/92., 113/93. – Odluka Ustavnog suda Republike Hrvatske, 4/94., 130/11., 110/15. i 102/19.) u članku 5. stavku 2. riječ: »dvije« zamjenjuje se riječju: »tri«.»

Our translation - not official

In the Act on Croatian Citizenship (Narodne novine, nos 53/91, 70/91 - corrigendum, 28/92, 113/93 - Decision of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia, 4/94, 130/11, 110/15 and 102/19), in article 5 paragraph 2 the word "two" is replaced by the word "three".

The amending act that extended the transitional window, and the authority for saying that the chain of amendments ends at NN 102/2019 before it.

Read it at the source
About this source

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.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Practical notes

The Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu has never been consolidated in Narodne novine. What is quoted here is the Act of 1991 read together with its amending acts of NN 70/1991, NN 28/1992, NN 113/1993, NN 4/1994, NN 130/2011, NN 110/2015, NN 102/2019 and NN 138/2021. The gazette's own register of every item published from 1990 to 2026 shows no later amendment.

This record does not read the two ordinances the Act relies on: the Pravilnik on the forms of application and the Pravilnik on how knowledge of Croatian, the Latin script, Croatian culture and the social order is tested, both of which article 18 of NN 130/2011 required the minister to make.

Article 26 of the Act lets the Ministry of the Interior refuse an application even where every condition is met, if it judges that reasons of interest to the Republic of Croatia require refusal, and says the reasons for refusal need not be stated in the decision. That is read here and it conditions everything above.

Nothing read here says what the Ministry asks for as proof of descent from an emigrant. The Act states the exemption and the definition and leaves the evidence to the procedure.

The residence route for the same families is separate and newer: article 79.a of the Zakon o strancima, added in 2025, uses a different and wider definition of the Croatian emigrant community and no date at all.

Sources3 · all accessed 2026-10-10
  • issues
    NN 102/2019, Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu

    Narodne novine

    About this source

    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.

    We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

  • issues
    NN 130/2011, Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu

    Narodne novine

    About this source

    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.

    We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

  • issues
    NN 53/1991, Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu

    Narodne novine

    About this source

    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.

    We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source