Article 7 citizenship processing time appears to be speeding up. LuxCitizenship can reveal that applicants in the United States who applied for proof of Luxembourgish citizenship under Article 7 (all-male lineage) in the second half of 2019 are starting to receive Citizenship Certificates.
From our observations, we are seeing Citizenship Certificates being issued for applicants who sent their applications to Luxembourg between July and mid-November of 2019.
This would seem to indicate that very few applications were made in the second half of 2019. Additionally, it seems that certificates from several different months are arriving in the US at the same time.
This matches up with LuxCitizenship’s own records. In our records, we sent a fraction of our 2018 caseload and 2020 caseload in the year of 2019.
Speed Increases Likely to Continue
Changes in the Last Year
Our own records indicate that cases for Article 7 started to increase significantly from May 2020 onwards. From November 2019 – April 2020, we continued to see fewer new cases submitted.
This would most likely mean the case processing speed may continue to grow considerably if there are at least five more months with smaller volumes of applications to process.
We may expect the Government to accelerate to be as quick as 12-14 months case processing time for Article 7 over the coming months. However, we want to emphasize that Article 7 has no legally mandated processing time. The processing time can change at any time with no advance notice.
Background on Article 7 Processing
The Ministry of Justice intended to restart Article 7 processing around March 2020. Once the pandemic hit, the Ministry offices were closed for several months. They began processing cases again in mid-June 2020, when they restarted off with applications sent in May 2018.
Around January 2021, the Ministry completed the processing of all different citizenship application types correctly submitted from US applicants in 2018. Therefore, it has taken around three months to process the majority of applications for Article 7 sent by US applicants in 2019.
