Obtaining Armenian citizenship could become more difficult and significantly more expensive. The Interior Ministry has submitted a legislative package for public discussion proposing legal residence and physical-presence requirements for acquiring citizenship, stricter verification of Armenian ethnicity, and an increase in the state fee from 50,000 drams to 250,000 drams. For renouncing citizenship, the ministry proposes raising the current fee from 150,000 drams to 1.5 million drams, Hetq reports.
The ministry justified the need for the changes by citing a “substantive rethinking” of the institution of citizenship.
According to the justification, the number of people who have had insufficient actual ties to Armenia, have never been in the country or have not lived there for a long period but nevertheless obtained Armenian citizenship has increased in recent years, including those seeking travel or other practical advantages.
From Jan. 1, 2021, through Aug. 31, 2026, 110,219 people acquired Armenian citizenship. Of them, 108,002 received passports with the “099” code. The ministry also noted in its justification that, according to data covering the past 15 years, about 250,000 people obtained Armenian citizenship, most of whom, in the ministry’s assessment, never established permanent residence in Armenia.
The new draft is based on the principle that citizenship should not become merely a means of obtaining an Armenian passport. The state aims to link the citizenship procedure to the existence of genuine ties with Armenia.
To this end, the proposal would establish a legal residency requirement for all foreign citizens seeking Armenian citizenship, including ethnic Armenians. In addition, applicants would be required to be physically present in the country for a specified period. Thus, documentary evidence of ties to Armenia alone would no longer be considered sufficient. Applicants would also need to be physically present in Armenia on the path to acquiring citizenship.
At the same time, ethnic Armenians would be subject to a more simplified procedure. The authors of the draft attributed this to the constitutional provision granting ethnic Armenians a special opportunity to acquire citizenship. Nevertheless, even in this case, applicants would be required to demonstrate at least some genuine ties to Armenia.
Another key area of the proposed changes concerns verification of whether a person is “ethnically Armenian.” Currently, documents prescribed by law are submitted to confirm ethnicity. The ministry that drafted the proposal, however, concluded that the mere availability of certain documents does not always make it possible to reliably establish a person’s Armenian ancestry.
The justification also addresses forged or altered documents. According to the ministry, cases have been recorded in which the ethnicity of a parent, grandmother, grandfather or another relative was altered or listed as “Armenian” in documents in order to benefit from the simplified procedure available to ethnic Armenians.
A total of 71 such cases were identified between 2023 and 2026. Five cases were recorded in 2023, rising to 21 in 2024 and 26 in 2025, while 19 cases had already been recorded in the first half of 2026.
The draft provides for the establishment of a special commission that would assess whether the submitted information is sufficient to confirm that a person is ethnically Armenian. The government would determine the commission’s procedures and powers.
Changes are also proposed concerning the completion of the process after citizenship is granted. Under the current system, after a presidential decree is issued, a person must participate in an oath-taking ceremony, but it is not clearly established at what point the decree takes legal effect. The draft clarifies this issue by stipulating that the decree would enter into force when the person signs the text of the oath. The person would have one year to do so.
If a person fails to attend the oath-taking ceremony and sign the oath within one year after the presidential decree is issued, the decree would not enter into force. The draft also stipulates that the oath-taking ceremony would be held exclusively within Armenia.
According to the justification, there have been cases in practice in which people failed to attend the oath-taking ceremony for years after a presidential decree was issued. As a result, it remained unclear whether the person intended to complete the citizenship process at all. In some cases, it was not even possible to rule out that the person had died. The proposed one-year deadline is therefore intended to eliminate this uncertainty.
A more substantial change has been proposed for people who have renounced citizenship. Current legislation does not establish a minimum period after renouncing citizenship during which a person cannot regain Armenian citizenship. The draft proposes restricting that possibility.
Under the proposal, a person would not be allowed to restore citizenship for five years after the presidential decree terminating citizenship enters into force.
The ministry explained the need for this restriction by citing cases in which people renounced Armenian citizenship and then attempted to restore it a short time later.
The justification also cites as an example situations in which a parent renounced citizenship in order to terminate the citizenship of male children or to avoid or postpone compulsory military service obligations, and later attempted to restore citizenship and once again benefit from the resulting rights and privileges. The state has thus sought to prevent citizenship status from being used for situational purposes. At the same time, the cost of acquiring and renouncing citizenship would change substantially.
According to the justification, acquiring or renouncing citizenship is not considered an ordinary administrative action because it creates or terminates a long-term legal relationship between the state and the individual.
The draft also changes existing approaches to the role of the president of the republic in granting citizenship.
The Interior Ministry has proposed clarifying the grounds for rejecting citizenship applications and requiring conclusions by competent state bodies to be reasoned. This means specifying the factual circumstances and risks underlying a conclusion that granting citizenship to a person could pose a threat to state or public security, public order, public health, the rights of others or other protected interests. However, a presidential decree denying citizenship may omit the reasoning behind the rejection.
The ministry attributed this approach to the possible presence of state secrets and other information protected by law. If the grounds for denying citizenship are based on classified information, disclosing them could, according to the justification, harm state or public security.
The reasoning must therefore be included in the administrative case materials and the competent authority’s conclusion, but it would not be mandatory to reproduce it in full in the presidential decree concerning the person who was denied citizenship.
The draft also places particular emphasis on the president’s discretionary authority. Under this approach, the president’s discretionary decision on granting citizenship cannot be changed through administrative or judicial procedures. However, this would not mean a complete exclusion of judicial review. A court could examine, for example, compliance with laws and procedures, whether the facts were properly established, whether the president exceeded the limits of discretion, and whether the authority was exercised in accordance with the purpose prescribed by law.
The current system for adopting citizenship-related decisions would also change. The draft proposes ending the activities of the interagency commission that reviews applications for acquiring and terminating citizenship.
According to the ministry, the commission has not provided significant additional results in practice. The justification says there have been almost no cases in which negative decisions were reconsidered or the administrative body’s preliminary position was changed. Instead, a more specialized commission would be created to address one specific issue: determining whether a person is ethnically Armenian.
The ministry said the proposed changes are intended to strengthen perceptions of the “legal significance and public value” of citizenship. In practice, the proposal would create a system requiring applicants to have closer genuine ties to Armenia, subjecting them to more extensive checks and substantially increasing the amount payable for renouncing citizenship.
