Uruguay’s Senate Committee on Constitution and Legislation has taken up a bill that ends mandatory witness testimony in legal citizenship applications, making documentary evidence the principal standard of proof.
The Chamber of Representatives passed the text unanimously on May 6, and three ministers of the Electoral Court (Corte Electoral) appeared before the committee on June 2 in support of it.
In total, the text rewrites 12 articles of Law 8,196 of February 2, 1928 and repeals eight more. That statute governs how foreigners demonstrate the conditions Article 75 of the Constitution sets for legal citizenship.
Those conditions stay intact: Good conduct; a profession, capital, or property in the country; and three years of habitual residence with family constituted in Uruguay, or five without.
A Procedure Built for 1928
Every applicant must currently present witnesses who testify at a separately scheduled hearing. Witnesses must be over 25, hold a civic credential, and have known the applicant for the full qualifying period; the rules exclude relatives, employers, employees, military personnel, and active police officers.
When a witness stumbles by forgetting the applicant’s surname, his address, or how long they have known each other, the Court orders a substitution and schedules a fresh hearing. Minister Arturo Silvera identified these substitutions as among the leading causes of rejection and delay; files complete on paper sit waiting for testimony, and the documents have already become redundant.
Demand has quintupled in 15 years. Applications averaged approximately 300 a year between 2010 and 2015, then 600 over the following five years, and roughly 1,500 annually over the past five, according to figures Silvera gave the committee. Argentines and Brazilians have historically dominated applications, while Cuban, Venezuelan, and Dominican numbers have multiplied fastest.
The lower house committee report describes cases in which an applicant receives a date to begin the procedure, a full year after requesting one.
Once underway, the procedure takes three to six months, Minister José Garchitorena estimated. Intake already runs through all 19 departmental offices following an administrative decentralization that Silvera called useful but insufficient.
Documents Replace Testimony
Under the new text, applicants prove residence with records showing entry and permanence in the country, such as migratory certificates, passports, and rental contracts.
Proof of arraigo (rootedness: A profession, business, capital, or property) comes from institutional certificates, which national bodies must issue free of charge. For good conduct, the Court itself will obtain the certificate directly from the Interior Ministry’s scientific police, removing another errand from the applicant’s side.
Witness testimony survives only as a supplementary device. An applicant unable to obtain a given document may offer substitute evidence, exceptionally including testimony, which the Court weighs at its discretion.
The bill also strips out procedures that died decades ago but never left the statute: Justice of the peace proceedings, political party delegates at hearings, and fines for contraventions. In exchange for the lighter procedure, the Court must publish on its website each month the list of resolved applications and the decision in each case.
A Wider Definition of Family
Family status determines whether the three-year or the five-year residence clock applies, so the bill’s redefinition of familia constituida carries practical weight. The new text recognizes family in four situations: Marriage, judicially declared cohabitation, having descendants, or living with and supporting a parent or sibling. By contrast, the 1928 framework anchored the concept essentially to marriage.
Couples who cohabit without a judicial declaration remain outside the definition, a gap Senator Pedro Bordaberry probed in committee. Court ministers answered that admitting undeclared unions would reintroduce the very testimonial proof the bill removes, since a bare declaration could otherwise shave two years off the residence requirement.
What the Reform Leaves Alone
No substantive requirement changes. Applicants must still prove age, residence, means of living, family status where claimed, identity, and good conduct; the bill says nothing about the Court’s administrative requirement that applicants understand and express themselves in Spanish.
Nor does the reform touch the electoral calendar. The Constitution bars new legal citizens from exercising citizenship rights until three years after the card’s issuance, and Silvera noted that only about one in four legal citizens ever registers in the Registro Cívico Nacional (National Civic Registry) at all.
Uruguay’s unresolved nationality question also stays out of the bill’s scope. Legal citizenship confers civil and political rights but not nationality, the distinction behind the passport anomaly Uruguay corrected in 2025, and both the committee report and the Court’s ministers stressed that this bill regulates Article 75 procedure and nothing more.
Where It Goes From Here
It was the Court that wrote the original draft, presenting it to Senate President Carolina Cosse last year before representatives from across the political spectrum introduced it in March. In committee, Silvera argued that the bill needs only a simple majority because it modifies procedure rather than the conditions for citizenship. As of the June 2 session, the committee had not scheduled a vote.
Philippe May of EC Holdings says this is “only a small administrative change. And for somebody who lived in Uruguay 3 or 5 years it’s an easy to provide two witnesses for the naturalization application.”
He argues that this shows that Uruguay is “keen to welcome qualified new citizens.” And that it shows a “positive attitude towards immigrants who want to become what is called ‘legal citizens’. The same applies for the expanded definition of a family.”
Uruguay’s three-to-five-year clock already ranks among the faster naturalization timelines in the Americas. Its permanent residency carries no investment threshold, and membership in the Mercosur residency area, one of the world’s most expansive settlement blocs, adds regional mobility on top. The witness hearing was the one step applicants could neither prepare for nor control.
