A Descendant of a Croatian Emigrant Is Asked for No Money, No Insurance and No Permit to Work - and Reaches Permanent Residence in Three Years
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Belize 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 Belize to Croatia · Residency through ancestry
On 15 March 2025 Croatia added a twelfth purpose to its list of temporary residences and built an entire route for the descendants of people who left. Article 79.a of the Zakon o strancima grants temporary residence for the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community to a Croatian emigrant, a family member of one, a descendant of one, or a family member of a descendant - proved by a certificate of the ministry competent for demography and emigration, which is the only test the Act itself states. Three things follow that no other category gets at once. Paragraph 3 excuses the applicant from proving means of support and from proving health insurance, the two conditions article 59 otherwise applies to everybody. Paragraph 4 gives the right to employment and self-employment with no residence and work permit and no work registration certificate, plus access to education and study. And the permit runs up to two years rather than one, and may be applied for at a police station inside Croatia even by a national who would normally need a visa to get here. After three continuous years of it, article 156(1) point 2 opens permanent residence - the national status, which asks for a valid passport and nothing else. The ministry's certificate is the gate, and the Act does not say what it takes to get one.
At a glance
- Proof of means of support
- Not required
Article 79.a(3) of the Zakon o strancima, added by article 19 of NN 40/2025, which excuses both means and insurance.
- Proof of health insurance
- Not required
Article 79.a(3) of the Zakon o strancima, added by article 19 of NN 40/2025.
- Permission to work
- None needed - employment and self-employment without a residence and work permit or work registration certificate
Article 79.a(4) of the Zakon o strancima, added by article 19 of NN 40/2025.
- Permit length
- Up to 2 years
Article 61(1) second indent point 4 of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 12 of NN 40/2025; the ordinary temporary residence runs one year.
- Where you apply
- At a police administration or police station inside Croatia, even if you need a visa to enter
Article 58(3) point 8 of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 10 of NN 40/2025, which otherwise sends visa nationals to a consulate.
- To permanent residence
- 3 continuous years on this permit
Article 156(1) point 2 of the Zakon o strancima as substituted by article 31 of NN 40/2025, with a certificate of the same ministry.
- What the certificate takes
- Not stated in the Zakon o strancima, which names the ministry and nothing else
Article 79.a(1) was read in article 19 of NN 40/2025 and no condition for the certificate appears anywhere in the Act.
Requirements
- A certificate of the ministry competent for demography and emigration that you are a Croatian emigrant, a family member of one, a descendant of one, or a family member of a descendant
- A valid travel document, a criminal record certificate on a first application, no entry ban and no danger to public order
- No proof of means of support
- No proof of health insurance
Country-level policy
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.
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 Belize
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
«(1) Privremeni boravak u svrhu useljavanja i povratka hrvatskog iseljeništva može se odobriti državljaninu treće zemlje koji je hrvatski iseljenik, član obitelji hrvatskog iseljenika, potomak hrvatskog iseljenika ili član obitelji potomka hrvatskog iseljenika, što dokazuje potvrdom ministarstva nadležnog za demografiju i useljeništvo.»Our translation - not official
(1) Temporary residence for the purpose of the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community may be granted to a third-country national who is a Croatian emigrant, a family member of a Croatian emigrant, a descendant of a Croatian emigrant or a family member of a descendant of a Croatian emigrant, which he proves by a certificate of the ministry competent for demography and emigration.
Four classes of person and one piece of paper. The Act sets no degree of kinship and no date of emigration.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«(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 in article 59(1) simply removed.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«(4) Državljanin treće zemlje kojem je odobren privremeni boravak u svrhu useljavanja i povratka hrvatskog iseljeništva ima pravo zapošljavanja i samozapošljavanja bez dozvole za boravak i rad odnosno potvrde o prijavi rada, pravo na programe obrazovanja, strukovne izobrazbe, obrazovanje i studiranje.»Our translation - not official
(4) A third-country national who has been granted temporary residence for the purpose of the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community has the right of employment and self-employment without a residence and work permit or a work registration certificate, the right to education programmes, vocational training, education and study.
The labour market gate in article 99, with its turnover tests and its ratio, does not apply to this person at all.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«podnosi zahtjev za odobrenje privremenog boravka u svrhu useljavanja i povratka hrvatskog iseljeništva iz članka 79.a ovoga Zakona.»Our translation - not official
lodges an application for temporary residence for the purpose of the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community under article 79.a of this Act
One of eight exceptions letting a visa national apply inside the country rather than at a consulate.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«rok važenja do dvije godine ako se odobrava: 1\. privremeni boravak u svrhu spajanja obitelji s hrvatskim državljaninom, državljaninom treće zemlje na dugotrajnom ili stalnom boravku, odobrenom azilu ili supsidijarnoj zaštiti sukladno propisu kojim se uređuje međunarodna zaštita ili državljaninom treće zemlje koji ima odobren privremeni boravak 2\. privremeni boravak u svrhu životnog ili neformalnog životnog partnerstva s hrvatskim državljaninom, državljaninom treće zemlje na dugotrajnom ili stalnom boravku, azilu ili supsidijarnoj zaštiti sukladno propisu kojim se uređuje međunarodna zaštita ili državljaninom treće zemlje koji ima odobren privremeni boravak 3\. autonomni boravak na temelju članaka 69. i 133.a ovoga Zakona 4\. privremeni boravak u svrhu useljavanja i povratka hrvatskog iseljeništva»Our translation - not official
a period of validity of up to two years where what is granted is: 1\. temporary residence for the purpose of family reunification with a Croatian citizen, a third-country national on long-term or permanent residence, granted asylum or subsidiary protection under the regulation governing international protection or a third-country national who has been granted temporary residence 2\. temporary residence for the purpose of life partnership or informal life partnership with a Croatian citizen, a third-country national on long-term or permanent residence, asylum or subsidiary protection under the regulation governing international protection or a third-country national who has been granted temporary residence 3\. autonomous residence on the basis of articles 69 and 133.a of this Act 4\. temporary residence for the purpose of the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community
The two-year band, which the returning diaspora shares with the spouse of a Croatian citizen.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«neposredno prije podnošenja zahtjeva imao neprekidno tri godine odobren privremeni boravak u svrhu useljavanja i povratka hrvatskog iseljeništva uz potvrdu ministarstva nadležnog za demografiju i useljeništvo»Our translation - not official
immediately before lodging the application had three years of continuous approved temporary residence for the purpose of the immigration and return of the Croatian emigrant community, with a certificate of the ministry competent for demography and emigration
Permanent residence in three years. The provision it replaced required a person of Croatian ethnicity to have returned with the intention of living permanently in Croatia and to have held temporary residence for three years.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
Narodne novine publishes acts as they were passed and does not consolidate them, so the current text of the Zakon o strancima is the 2020 Act read together with the amending acts of NN 114/2022, NN 151/2022, NN 40/2025 and NN 55/2026. Every article cited here was checked against all four.
The route is fifteen months old and the Act delegates its only real condition. Nothing in the Zakon o strancima says what evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration asks for, how far back a descendant may reach, or whether the emigrant must have left before any particular date. That is read nowhere here, and it is the question a reader will have.
This is a residence route and not a citizenship route, and the two are separate. Article 11 of the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu lets the descendant of an emigrant naturalise with no residence in Croatia at all - see the citizenship record - and it defines the emigrant far more narrowly than article 79.a does, by a date of 8 October 1991.
Permanent residence under article 156 is the national status. Article 157(4) asks for a valid travel document and no danger to public order, and no Croatian language examination. Long-term residence under article 153, the Union status, asks for five years, means, insurance and Croatian; the two are different documents.
A person on this permit counts on the Croatian side of the employer ratio in article 99(11) to (13), which is a second effect of the same certificate and sits on the work record.
- issuesNN 40/2025, Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama Zakona o strancima
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.
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