Myanmar nationality law

The Nationality law of Myanmar currently recognises three categories of citizens, namely citizen, associate citizen and naturalised citizen, according to the 1982 Citizenship Law. Citizens, as defined by the 1947 Constitution, are persons who belong to an "indigenous race", have a grandparent from an "indigenous race", are children of citizens, or lived in British Burma prior to 1942.

Under the Burma Residents Registration Act of 1949 and the 1951 Resident Registration Rules, Burmese citizens are required to obtain a National Registration Card (နိုင်ငံသားစိစစ်ရေးကတ်ပြား, NRC), while non-citizens are given a Foreign Registration Card (နိုင်ငံခြားသားစိစစ်ရေးကတ်ပြား, FRC). Citizens whose parents hold FRCs are not allowed to run for public office. In 1989, the government conducted a nationwide citizenship scrutiny process to replace NRCs with citizenship scrutiny cards (CSCs) to certify citizenship.

Myanmar has a stratified citizenship system. Burmese citizens' rights are distinctively different depending on the category they belong to and based on how one's forebears acquired their own citizenship category.

• Full citizens (နိုင်ငံသား) are descendants of residents who lived in Burma prior to 1823 or were born to parents who were citizens at the time of birth.
• Associate citizens (ဧည့်နိုင်ငံသား) are those who acquired citizenship through the 1948 Union Citizenship Law.
• Naturalised citizens (နိုင်ငံသားပြုခွင့်ရသူ) are those who lived in Burma before 4 January 1948 and applied for citizenship after 1982.