The Consulate Told My Client, in Writing, That He Didn't Need the B1 Exam. The Law Suggested Otherwise.

One of the applicants I've worked with has an email from a Romanian consulate stating that the B1 Romanian language exam was not required for his citizenship application. He filed not long after Law 14/2025, the law that introduced that exact requirement, took effect on March 15, 2025.

Here's the sentence this whole post hangs on: a written assurance from a consulate and the text of the law it's supposed to reflect don't always say the same thing. And when they don't, most applicants never notice until it's far too late to do anything about it.

He Had the Email. We Also Had the Legislation.

He didn't just rely on what the consulate told him. Together, we went to the source: the actual legislation and the coverage around Law 14/2025. And the law, as written, read plainly, may have applied to his filing date. The people telling him it didn't apply may simply not have caught up yet with their own government's new law.

So he was holding two things at once. A written assurance from the people whose job it is to know the answer. And the primary source, which said: maybe not.

I want to describe that position precisely, because if you go through this process you will likely meet it yourself. It isn't panic. It's a specific, quiet unease that comes from being told "you're fine" by an authority while the document in front of you says "possibly not." Most people resolve that tension by choosing to believe the reassuring answer. We chose not to resolve it. We treated both as live possibilities and planned for each.

What that case teaches is structural, not personal: the people communicating with applicants day to day are not always the same people who are fully briefed on legislative changes the moment they happen. That's not an accusation against anyone at any consulate. It's just how large government systems work when a law moves faster than internal communication does.

This Is Normal, and That's Exactly the Problem

This isn't a story about one consulate being disorganized. It's a story about what happens almost everywhere when a rule changes. The people on the front lines, the ones applicants actually talk to, often don't have updated guidance for weeks or months. Sometimes their guidance contradicts another consulate's guidance about the same law in the same window. In the months after Law 14/2025 took effect, that's exactly what applicants across different consulates reported.

Which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion: if you're waiting for an official, unambiguous, well-communicated signal that a window is closing before you act, that signal usually doesn't arrive in time to matter. By the time everyone agrees on what changed, the change already happened, and the people who acted early are the ones who filed under the old rules.

This Has Already Happened in Other Countries

I cover this in more depth elsewhere on this blog, so briefly: Italy moved to sharply restrict its historically open citizenship by descent program, with a decree that took effect essentially overnight. Hungary requires a language interview for its descent pathway. Romania added the B1 language-proof requirement. The direction across Europe's citizenship by descent programs over the last few years is one direction, and it isn't toward more access.

What We Actually Did About It

We didn't take the assurance, verbal or written, at face value and move on. We took specific steps to document and protect his position, so that if the National Citizenship Authority in Bucharest, the body that actually decides, ever reads his timeline differently than the consulate did, he isn't standing there with nothing but a memory of a conversation. And separately, we treated the exam as if it might apply anyway, so no deadline could sneak up on the file.

I'm not going to lay out those steps here, partly because the right version of them depends on your specific dates and correspondence, and partly because this is genuinely some of the highest-value ground I cover with clients.

But the principle is public and it's the point of this post: there is a difference between hoping you're fine and having a documented basis for your position if it's ever questioned. When a rule changes around your application, you want to be in the second category. Most people don't find out which category they're in until it's too late to switch.

Where This Leaves You

Rule changes in this space don't announce themselves clearly, and the people meant to explain them are often still catching up themselves. That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to act while your eligibility is clear and to paper your position as you go.

If you think you might be eligible for Romanian or Polish citizenship, the Roadmap Call is where we figure out exactly where your timing stands, and what, if anything, you should be documenting right now to protect yourself later. I've done it for my own family's files and for clients caught in exactly the gray zone above. I'll show you how to think about yours.

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