The origins the Spanish Civil Code names

Not a treaty and not a bloc. Article 22.1 of the Spanish Civil Code names "nacionales de origen de países iberoamericanos, Andorra, Filipinas, Guinea Ecuatorial o Portugal" and Sephardim, and article 23(b) exempts the same list from renouncing the nationality they hold. The class is drawn by language and colonial history, and Spain decides its membership alone: no instrument of the other states is involved and none of them can change it.

**The Code does not define "países iberoamericanos".** The nineteen states listed here are the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking states of the Americas in this corpus. Haiti, Guyana, Suriname and the Anglophone Caribbean are not Ibero-American on any reading, and the Code gives them nothing: a Jamaican and an Argentine applying in Madrid on the same day are eight years apart. Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and Portugal are inside the class and outside this corpus.

**"De origen" is doing work.** The article reaches nationals of origin, not holders of the passport, so a person naturalised in one of these countries is not plainly inside it. Nothing in the articles we have read resolves that case.

Where it actually bites

Membership is one thing and what a destination does with it is another. These are the countries covered here that treat these nationalities differently, and on which question.

Spain

• Becoming a citizen · Two Years Instead of Ten, and You Keep the Passport You Have