Descent Gets You Citizenship Directly or Nothing at All - There Is No Residence Permit for Having Montenegrin Roots
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Poland on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.
195 exceptions recorded across 74 countries · none match Poland to Montenegro · Residency through ancestry
Montenegro answers ancestry in the citizenship Act, not in the foreigners Act, and it answers it in two places that leave a gap in between. Article 5 of the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu gives citizenship by origin to a child both of whose parents were Montenegrin citizens at birth, and to a child with one such parent in three further situations; article 6 extends it to a child born abroad with one Montenegrin parent if an entry in the register is applied for before 18, and - the limb that matters to an adult - to a person who has turned 18 with one Montenegrin parent and one foreign parent, if he applies for entry in the register of Montenegrin citizens before the age of 23. After 23 that door is closed. What is left is naturalisation, and article 10 gives a Montenegrin emigrant and a family member up to the third degree of kinship in the direct line a shortened route: citizenship by naturalisation after two years of lawful and continuous residence in Montenegro, against the ten years article 8 asks of everyone else, and without the language test, the release from the previous citizenship or the residence requirement of article 8. What article 10 does not give is the residence. It assumes it. And article 38(1) of the Zakon o strancima, the closed list of grounds for temporary residence, contains nothing about descent, origin or emigrant status - so an applicant under article 10 has to find a separate ground to be lawfully resident for those two years in the first place.
At a glance
- Residence permit by descent
- None among the thirteen grounds in article 38(1) of the Zakon o strancima
Ancestry appears nowhere in the Act's closed list of grounds, nor in the permit articles 44 to 60a that follow it.
- Citizenship by origin for an adult
- On application before the age of 23, where one parent is a Montenegrin citizen
Article 6(1)(2) of the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu (Sluzbeni list CG 13/08).
- Residence required of a Montenegrin emigrant
- Two years of lawful and continuous residence, against ten for everyone else
Article 10 of the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu, which also drops the language test and the release from the previous citizenship that article 8 requires.
- How far the emigrant limb reaches
- To the third degree of kinship in the direct line
Article 10 of the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu.
Requirements
- For citizenship by origin as an adult, one Montenegrin parent and an application for entry in the register of Montenegrin citizens before the age of 23
- For the emigrant route, status as a Montenegrin emigrant or a family member up to the third degree of kinship in the direct line
- Two years of lawful and continuous residence in Montenegro, held on one of the ordinary grounds in article 38 of the Zakon o strancima, since descent is not one of them
- Being 18, accommodation and a permanent source of income giving material and social security, no qualifying conviction, no security obstacle, and tax and other statutory obligations settled
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Poland
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
«Crnogorsko državljanstvo porijeklom stiče i: 1) dijete rođeno na teritoriji druge države, čiji je jedan roditelj u trenutku rođenja djeteta crnogorski državljanin, ako se do navršene 18. godine života podnese prijava za upis u matičnu knjigu rođenih i registar crnogorskih državljana, ako nema državljanstvo druge države; 2) lice koje je navršilo 18 godina života, čiji je jedan roditelj crnogorski državljanin, a drugi je državljanin druge države, ako do navršene 23. godine života podnese zahtjev za upis u registar crnogorskih državljana; 3) dijete u slučaju potpunog usvojenja, ako je jedan od usvojilaca crnogorski državljanin.»Our translation - not official
Montenegrin citizenship by origin is also acquired by: 1) a child born on the territory of another state, one of whose parents is a Montenegrin citizen at the time of the child's birth, if an application for entry in the register of births and in the register of Montenegrin citizens is lodged before the age of 18, where the child does not have the citizenship of another state; 2) a person who has turned 18, one of whose parents is a Montenegrin citizen and the other a citizen of another state, if before the age of 23 he lodges an application for entry in the register of Montenegrin citizens; 3) a child in the case of full adoption, if one of the adopters is a Montenegrin citizen.
Point 1 was amended by article 1 of the amending Act of 9 July 2010 (Sluzbeni list CG 40/10), which replaced the words about not holding another state's citizenship with words about not holding the citizenship of the other parent. Point 2 is as enacted.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«Crnogorski iseljenik i član njegove porodice do trećeg stepena srodstva u pravoj liniji može steći crnogorsko državljanstvo prijemom ako zakonito i neprekidno boravi u Crnoj Gori najmanje dvije godine i ispunjava uslove iz člana 8 stav 1 tač. 1,4,5,7 i 8 ovog zakona.»Our translation - not official
A Montenegrin emigrant and a member of his family up to the third degree of kinship in the direct line may acquire Montenegrin citizenship by naturalisation if he resides lawfully and continuously in Montenegro for at least two years and meets the conditions of article 8 paragraph 1 points 1, 4, 5, 7 and 8 of this Act.
The points taken across are age, accommodation and a permanent source of income, no qualifying conviction in Montenegro and abroad, no security obstacle, and settled tax and other statutory obligations. Not taken across are the ten years of residence, the release from the previous citizenship and the Montenegrin language test.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«1) spajanja porodice; 2) školovanja; 3) učešća u programima međunarodne razmjene učenika i studenata ili drugim programima mladih; 4) specijalizacije, stručnog osposobljavanja ili praktične obuke stranaca; 5) naučno-istraživačkog rada;»Our translation - not official
1) family reunification; 2) schooling; 3) participation in international pupil and student exchange programmes or other youth programmes; 4) specialisation, professional training or practical training of foreigners; 5) scientific research work;
The opening of the closed list of grounds for temporary residence. Neither it nor the eight points that follow mentions descent, origin or emigrant status.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
Practical notes
The two years article 10 asks for are years of lawful and continuous residence, and the Zakon o strancima gives no permit on the strength of descent, so they have to be held on another ground - work, family reunification, study or property. That gap between the two Acts is what makes the emigrant route harder than it reads.
Who counts as a Montenegrin emigrant is not defined in the articles we quote, and we have not read the provisions or the separate law that defines emigrant status.
Article 8(1)(2) requires release from the citizenship of another state for ordinary naturalisation and article 10 does not take that point across, so the emigrant route does not on its face require giving up another passport. We have not read how the Ministry applies it.
- issuesZakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu, Sluzbeni list Crne Gore broj 13/2008
Sluzbeni list Crne Gore
About this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
- issuesZakon o strancima, Sluzbeni list Crne Gore broj 12/2018
Sluzbeni list Crne Gore
About this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source