Germany: 50,000 in danger of losing citizenship
01 May 2005
On 1 January 2000, a new citizenship law was passed in Germany denying the right to dual nationality (see Statewatch vol 9 nos 2, 3 & 4). Similar to the recent immigration law reform (see
Statewatch vol 15 no 1), the citizenship proposals started out as an attempt to liberalise the existing law, which was based on the blood principle ('Jus sanguinis'), but was met with a populist campaign by the conservative
Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) and her sister party
Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU), who launched a petition to "mobilise the population" against the reforms, particularly those amendments relating to dual nationality. They collected five million signatures with the result that existing citizenship law denies dual nationality. Children born of foreigners have to decide on their nationality by the age of 23 and revoke one passport.
Five years after these changes and backed by the recent immigration law reform, the German government has started a drive to track down and revoke the German citizenship of Germans of Turkish origin who applied for Turkish citizenship since 2000. In April this year, Interior Minister Schily, in a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Abdülkadir Aksu, demanded from him a list of people who applied for and received Turkish citizenship since 2000, which, according to the Turkish foreign office, amounts to around 50,000 people who would automatically lose their German citizenship under the current law. The loss of German citizenship obviously implies the loss of citizenship rights and, in the case of Turkish dual citizens, the necessity to receive non-EU residency and work permits. Aksu has neither confirmed nor denied that Turkey will pass this list to the German authorities.
Schily's initiative was paralleled by the regional authorities sending out letters to Germans of Turkish origin since the beginning of this year. In North-Rhine Westphalia alone, around 70,000 people were targeted. Almost all replied and 4,000 said that they took up Turkish citizenship after 2000. In June this year, the Hamburg authorities followed suit and sent letters to 6,000 Germans of Turkish origin, in which they call on them to inform the authorities about the status of their citizenship by 7 July. Both Schily and the regional authorities argue they want to update the electoral register for the upcoming regional and general elections. The replies therefore have serious consequences for the right to vote: if the authorities do not receive an answer, they will be "automatically deleted from the electoral register and from then onwards treated as a Turkish citizen", says Reinhard Fallak, spokesman of the interior ministry of the city state of Hamburg.
Mahmut Erdem, a Hamburg lawyer and member of the "No loss of German citizenship" campaign, has criticised the initiative and argues it gives the impression that those naturalised are "second-class citizens". Further, he argues the initiative stigmatises Germans of Turkish origin, because other naturalised citizens who are in the same situation were not contacted. Eastern European and Russian immigrants of German origin who received citizenship on grounds of their "blood origin" but have also applied for Russian citizenship will now face the same problems.
Between 1991 and 2003, around 622,000 Turks applied for German citizenship and many of them then re-applied for their Turkish citizenship, often for reasons concerning Turkey's inheritance laws. Whilst former German law stipulated that applicants cannot have another nationality whilst applying for German citizenship, and Turkish law, contrary to that of Morocco or Greece, for example, does not protect people from expatriation, many Turks denaturalised, applied for German citizenship and re-applied for Turkish citizenship. This became almost standard practice over the past 15 years, but now has severe consequences.
Despite protests by German-Turkish associations, the governmen