I refer to the letter from Ms Joanne Refalo (The Sunday Times, May 14) entitled "Renouncing citizenship".

Ms Refalo should make a distinction between those persons who qualify automatically to hold dual citizenship and those who do not. In the case of the latter group all the persons concerned ceased to be citizens of Malta either when they acquired a foreign citizenship or on their 19th birthday, if they failed to renounce their foreign citizenship.

It is to be pointed out that the persons who qualify automatically to hold dual citizenship are those persons who became citizens of Malta on September 21, 1964 (Malta's independence) or subsequently at birth. The persons concerned must have also spent years residing out of Malta to qualify for dual citizenship.

It, therefore, follows that persons who acquired a foreign citizenship but were citizens of Malta by registration or by naturalisation at the time, as well as those persons who resided abroad for less than six years, do not qualify automatically for dual citizenship.

In order that former citizens of Malta could "reacquire" Maltese citizenship automatically there was only one option open for the legislator: to declare that they never ceased to be citizens of Malta. Otherwise they could only "reacquire" Maltese citizenship by registration; but in such a case it would not have been an automatic reacquisition.

I reiterate that such a measure applies only in the case of former citizens of Malta who qualify for the automatic reacquisition of Maltese citizenship.