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Uruguay Fixes Anomaly That Made Its Passport Useless for Naturalized Citizens

For a long time, Uruguayan passports of naturalized citizens were useless for international travel. The government has now fixed that.

For a long time, Uruguayan passports of naturalized citizens were useless for international travel. The government has now fixed that.

Uruguay’s Ministry of the Interior implemented a vital passport update this week, resolving a bureaucratic confusion that had effectively prevented thousands of naturalized citizens from traveling freely with their Uruguayan passports.

For many years, Uruguay stood alone globally in its peculiar treatment of naturalized citizens. Due to a misinterpretation of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) guidelines, the country incorrectly listed naturalized citizens’ countries of birth as their nationality on official documents.

In some cases, officials left the nationality field blank when citizens had lost their nationality of origin. This arose from a literal interpretation of the Spanish translation of ICAO 9303 part 3 manual, which uses the word “nationality” rather than “citizenship” as in the original English version.

This created a paradoxical situation where individuals who had renounced their original nationality to become Uruguayan citizens faced travel complications with their Uruguayan passports despite having full citizenship rights within Uruguay.

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The first “corrected” Uruguayan passport went to Gulnor Saratbekova on April 16, a woman from Tajikistan who has lived in Uruguay for more than 20 years. The document finally identifies her as Uruguayan rather than listing her birth country as her nationality.

Before receiving her updated passport, Gulnor told El Observador she felt “in a limbo where I’m from two places, but at the same time I’m from nowhere. […] it’s as if I had a father and mother, neither of whom recognizes me as their legitimate child.”

Gulnor’s case highlights the complexity of the situation. Tajikistan, like at least 27 other countries, doesn’t accept dual nationality. Officials there confiscated her Tajik passport when she obtained Uruguayan legal citizenship. Hence, although she was a citizen of Uruguay and had full rights (living, working, studying, and voting, etc.), she couldn’t use her Uruguayan passport for travel, and she no longer had her Tajik one.

This passport anomaly affected approximately 16,000 foreign-born citizens who had obtained Uruguayan legal citizenship, according to El Observador, with roughly 1,500 new legal citizens added annually who face the same issue.

Unlike most countries, Uruguay’s system caused significant international travel complications. Countries like France and Switzerland didn’t recognize these passports as valid Uruguayan passports issued to legal citizens, requiring them to obtain a passport from their country of origin to travel to these countries.

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Unlike other countries in the region, Uruguay offered no mechanism for naturalizing foreigners. Only birth in Uruguay or being the child or grandchild of Uruguayans qualified someone as “ciudadano natural” (natural citizen), the constitutional concept that makes one Uruguayan by nationality.

The issue reached a critical point in 2015 when the International Civil Aviation Organization began issuing electronic passports that mentioned nationality instead of country of birth.

ICAO guidelines specifically note that an error to avoid is “MRZ citizenship incorrectly reports the country of birth rather than citizenship” – exactly the mistake Uruguay had been making.

For many like Gulnor, this created serious travel complications. Officials detained her for hours when traveling to Buenos Aires due to this “documentary error.” Others faced visa requirements in countries where Uruguayan citizens normally enjoy visa-free travel.

The situation proved serious enough to reach the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which addressed the case as a potential human rights violation regarding the right to nationality and identity.

The passport update changes the “Nationality” field to “Nationality/Citizenship” and enters the code “URY” for all citizens, both natural and legal. The Ministry also eliminated the “Place of Birth” field, which ICAO document 9303 no longer requires.

While this administrative fix resolves immediate travel issues, the fundamental constitutional issue persists. The National Human Rights Institution of Uruguay plans to organize a meeting next week aimed at encouraging Parliament to tackle the underlying issue—amending the Constitution to recognize legal citizens as Uruguayan nationals.

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