Myanmar nationality law

Myanmar Citizenship Law
မြန်မာနိုင်ငံသားဥပဒေ
People's Assembly
CitationLaw No. 4 of 1982
Territorial extentMyanmar
Enacted byPeople's Assembly
Enacted15 October 1982
Commenced15 October 1982
Status: Amended

The Nationality law of Myanmar currently recognises three categories of citizens, namely citizen, associate citizen and naturalised citizen, according to the 1982 Citizenship Law.[1][2] Citizens, as defined by the 1947 Constitution, are persons who belong to an "indigenous race", have a grandparent from an "indigenous race", are children of citizens, or lived in British Burma prior to 1942.[3][4]

Under the Burma Residents Registration Act of 1949 and the 1951 Resident Registration Rules, Burmese citizens are required to obtain a National Registration Card (နိုင်ငံသားစိစစ်ရေးကတ်ပြား, NRC), while non-citizens are given a Foreign Registration Card (နိုင်ငံခြားသားစိစစ်ရေးကတ်ပြား, FRC).[5] Citizens whose parents hold FRCs are not allowed to run for public office.[6] In 1989, the government conducted a nationwide citizenship scrutiny process to replace NRCs with citizenship scrutiny cards (CSCs) to certify citizenship.[5]

Myanmar has a stratified citizenship system. Burmese citizens' rights are distinctively different depending on the category they belong to and based on how one's forebears acquired their own citizenship category.

  • Full citizens (နိုင်ငံသား) are descendants of residents who lived in Burma prior to 1823 or were born to parents who were citizens at the time of birth.
  • Associate citizens (ဧည့်နိုင်ငံသား) are those who acquired citizenship through the 1948 Union Citizenship Law.
  • Naturalised citizens (နိုင်ငံသားပြုခွင့်ရသူ) are those who lived in Burma before 4 January 1948 and applied for citizenship after 1982.
  1. ^ Tun Tun Aung (March 2007). "An Introduction to Citizenship Card under Myanmar Citizenship Law" (PDF). 現代社會文化研究 (38): 265–290. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 May 2014.
  2. ^ "Burma Citizenship Law". Government of Burma. UNHCR. 15 October 1982. Retrieved 15 March 2012.
  3. ^ Battistella, Graziano (January 2017). "Rohingyas: The People for Whom No One Is Responsible". International Migration Policy Report. Center for Migration Studies of New York. pp. 4–17 – via ResearchGate.
  4. ^ Faruk, Hassan; Imran, Md. Al; Mian, Nannu (2014). "The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: A Vulnerable Group in Law and Policy". pp. 226–253 – via ResearchGate.
  5. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Soe Than Lynn; Shwe Yinn Mar Oo (20 September 2010). "Citizenship criteria trips up election candidates". Myanmar Times. Archived from the original on 13 March 2012. Retrieved 15 March 2012.