Home Affairs unveils new digital portal for citizenship verification

Home Affairs unveils new digital portal for citizenship verification

Zuko Komisa

• The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) launched a new Digital Citizenship Verification Portal to help citizens check their status, starting with those who lost it after 1995.
• This initiative follows a May court ruling that declared the automatic loss of citizenship for acquiring another nationality unconstitutional, retroactively affirming affected individuals never lost their status.
• The new portal establishes a foundation for the DHA’s future digitisation efforts and will streamline the process for former citizens to regularise their records.

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) has announced the launch of a significant new digital tool designed to help South Africans verify their citizenship status.

This initiative marks a crucial step in the department’s wider digitisation drive.

The new Digital Citizenship Verification Portal will focus on assisting individuals who may have involuntarily lost their South African citizenship since October 1995.

For nearly three decades, a specific rule stipulated that any South African who voluntarily acquired the citizenship of another country automatically forfeited their South African nationality, unless they had successfully applied to the government to retain it.

However, this regulation was declared unconstitutional in May of this year, following a successful court challenge brought by the Democratic Alliance (DA) against the DHA.