The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee met in Nicosia on Thursday 3rd of April.
The main topic of discussion was the delays in the processing of applications for citizenship and residence permits.
In particular, Cyprus Auditor General Andreas Papaconstantinou said that the main reason for this trend is the dramatic burden on the Cypriot Ministry of Interior between 2020 and 2023 due to the increased flow of migrants. He stressed that despite the difficulties, the ministry, together with other agencies, had made every effort to speed up the processing of documents.
Papakonstantinou said that as of November 2023, some 12,000 applications for Cypriot citizenship were pending. The average waiting period for their processing is up to 3 years for naturalisation applications and up to 2 years for applications based on marriage to a Cypriot citizen. Papaconstantinou also added that the requirement to have resided in Cyprus for 12 months before applying has been partially relaxed: it is now permissible to leave the country for up to 90 days. A legislative amendment to this effect has already been submitted to Parliament.
As regards applications for permanent residence permits (category F) for foreigners with foreign income, the department has suspended the processing of new applications until the new legislation comes into force in 2019. As a result, there is a backlog of about 3,000 pending cases as of July 2023.
There were also irregularities in the area of temporary residence permits for students, with missing supporting documents, delays, and cases where 16% of students left the country after their permit expired and 12% did not leave the country at all, according to a spot check.
There was also a blatant case of a Turkish Cypriot being issued five identity cards and passports with different photos, which calls into question the effectiveness of local identification mechanisms.
For her part, Natasha Economou, a spokeswoman for the civil registry department of the Cypriot interior ministry, said that as part of the solution to the staffing problem, the recruitment of five more staff on fixed-term contracts funded by European funds had been approved. This should speed up the processing of the backlog of applications. Economou also noted that the number of applications for citizenship has fallen significantly since the law was tightened. Nevertheless, there have been isolated cases of citizenship being granted on humanitarian grounds.
It should be recalled that the Court of Auditors previously stated that Cyprus would process 22,740 applications for citizenship between 2020 and 2023.
Of these, 4,743 were in 2020, 4,817 in 2021, 7,071 in 2022 and 6,109 in 2023 (up to July). At the same time, 57% of the applications were filed on the basis of naturalisation after long-term legal residence on the island, 19% based on marriage to a Cypriot citizen and another 24% concerned other cases.
The experts found considerable delays in the processing of cases and numerous irregularities in the naturalisation process. Some people have been waiting for their documents to be processed since 2007.
The Cyprus Court of Auditors' report highlighted serious systemic problems that require urgent action to increase transparency, speed up the processing of applications and eliminate loopholes to circumvent the law.