The National Court has rejected the appeal of a Russian citizen who was denied Spanish nationality after alerting the CNI that he worked for the intelligence services of his country and recommending that his application not be accepted for reasons of “national security”.
In the sentence, handed down in May, the Court endorses the decision adopted by the Ministry of Justice, which considered that the man had not justified the “good civic conduct” required by article 22.4 of the Civil Code to grant nationality by residence.
The person affected is a Russian national man born in 1988, married to a Spanish woman in December 2016 and resident in Spain since February 2017.
To deny his request for Spanish nationality, Justice relied on a CNI report, which recommended rejecting it because he had “proven knowledge of the conscious work of the interested party for the Russian Intelligence Services, from which he receives missions.”
Likewise, the CNI added, “contacts of this individual have been detected with some of the main leaders of transnational organized crime of Russian origin, for whom he also performs different tasks.”
For the magistrates of the National Court, the report is “sufficiently expressive of the inadmissibility of granting the requested nationality”, even if the interested party questions its content.
In addition to that document, they point out, there is a criminal case against him – precisely for the alleged crime of “revealing secrets” – whose “provisional” file is due to the fact that it has not been possible to ascertain his whereabouts.
It is, it is highlighted in the sentence, “a history of possible participation in acts of criminal relevance, of seriousness, which also makes it difficult to appreciate the concurrence of the requirement of good conduct.”
To achieve nationality by residence, you must meet defined requirements, such as demonstrating a specific period of legal residence in the country, and other indeterminate ones, such as justifying good civic conduct or a sufficient degree of integration into Spanish society.
The magistrates indicate that in order to demonstrate this integration it is not necessary to respond to the generally accepted image of what “a good citizen” should be, but they also stress that the lack of a criminal record does not simply serve to demonstrate good civic conduct.
“It is perfectly possible, depending on the circumstances of the case, that a person without a criminal record, or with a canceled record, should be considered lacking in good civic conduct, and vice versa,” they point out.
