Citizenship should indicate a genuine link between a state and a person.
This doctrine was famously formulated by the International Court of Justice in its 1955 Nottebohm decision: “According to the practice of States, to arbitral and judicial decisions and to the opinions of writers, nationality is a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties (ICJ Reports 1955 (4), p. 23).”
This doctrine was famously formulated by the International Court of Justice in its 1955 Nottebohm decision: “According to the practice of States, to arbitral and judicial decisions and to the opinions of writers, nationality is a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties (ICJ Reports 1955 (4), p. 23).”
Citizenship laws provide rules on the loss of citizenship. In certain cases a person may be deemed to have lost her or his genuine link with a state. In other cases the state may deprive a person of her or his citizenship because of a lack of a genuine link, for example as manifested by continuous residence abroad, or a person may divest herself or himself of the citizenship of a state with which she or he no longer has a serious link. Most citizenship laws also include rules on the loss of citizenship as a result of irregularities during the acquisition procedure of a citizenship by naturalisation, registration or declaration of option. Some jurisdictions provide for rules, which allow deprivation of citizenship in cases where certain manifestations of disloyalty of a person towards her or his state are discovered, for example by service in the army of a foreign state.
The object of this presentation is a comparative analysis of the rules on the loss of citizenship across thirty-three European countries, with a focus on political and legislative trends since the 1980s. Particular attention will be given to the question of conflicting loyalties and the citizenship status of emigrants.
The presentation is based on the following paper:
De Groot, G.R. and M. Vink (2010). Loss of Citizenship: Trends and Regulations in Europe. Comparative Report, RSCAS/EUDO-CIT-Comp. 2010/4. EUDO Citizenship Observatory, pp. 52. Available at: http://eudo-citizenship.eu/docs/Loss.pdf.
Maarten Vink is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Leiden University (2003) and has been in Maastricht since 2004. Vink was previously also a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2003-2004) and FCT Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal (2007-2010). He held Visiting Scholarships at the Center for European Studies, New York University (2004) and at the Department of Philosophy and Culture at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal (2005).
