Latvia said on Tuesday almost 70,000 people had received Latvian citizenship through naturalisation since 1995, responding to a key concern of the EU and NATO blocs it is about to join.

"According to our data we expect that we will reach the full 70,000 in mid-February," Liga Lukso, a spokeswoman of the Latvian Naturalisation Board told AFP.

Latvia, which regained independence in 1991, automatically granted citizenship only to residents and descendants of those who lived in the Baltic country before it was annexed by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II, leaving hundreds of thousands of mostly Russian-speaking Soviet-era settlers without citizenship.

Minority rights and citizenship issues have proved a bone of attention with Moscow, and the EU and NATO have urged Latvia to make naturalisation requirements, including a language exam, easier.

The Naturalisation Board said that on October 1, 2003 some 487,826 of the country's 2.3 million inhabitants, or 21 percent of the population, were non-citizens.

Since 1995 some 70,038 applications for naturalisation have been filed, with 69,288 granted Latvian citizenship.

Since 1999, when citizenship was granted to children born to non-citizens and stateless persons in Latvia after independence in 1991, some 1,300 children received citizenship.

When visiting Latvia last September ahead of a referendum on EU membership the EU's enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen urged the Russian-speakers living there stateless to naturalise to avoid being left out even further in the cold after membership.

In the latest bone of contention, Russian-speakers have held a series of protests against a new education reform which requires more subjects be taught in Latvian in minority schools.