Parliament has passed the Government bill for the amendment of the Citizenship Law which prolongs the period for receiving applications for Citizenship for another year. Applications will be accepted, however, only from people who hold residential rights in one of the localities in the annexed territories, but could not claim their citizenship because they were out of the country when the Citizenship lists were compiled.
The legal position of the overwhelming mass of the Jewish Staatenlose in Roumania is consequently left where it was.
Objections on this ground were made by Deputy Landau on behalf of the Jewish Parliamentary Club, who was supported by Deputy Rosenberg, one of the Jewish members of the Government Party, who demanded that the basis for acquiring citizenship in the new provinces should not be administrative domicile as at present, but actual domicile at the time of the annexation.
Deputy Weissmann, of the Jewish Parliamentary Club, pointed out that thousands of Jews of Old Roumania who had fought for their Fatherland in the Great War, were still refused Roumanian citizenship, and the present bill did not take any account of their position.
The Minister of Justice, M. Mihai Popovici, said in his reply to the debate, that Roumania had always acted up to the obligations which she had assumed in the international treaties. At the same time, the Government was less influenced in this matter by the international treaties than by the desire to act justly towards all loyal inhabitants of the country.
The present amending law did not attempt to do anything more, he said, than prolong the term for receiving applications for entering names on the citizenship lists. That alone was an act of justice to thousands of people. Unfortunately the debate had not dealt with the bill before the House, but with the shortcomings of the citizenship laws as a whole. He wanted to say, he concluded, that the Government is now working on a bill to modify fundamentally the entire Citizenship law, and in this connection it would take into consideration all the arguments that had been advanced in the course of the debate.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
