{"id":67144,"date":"2013-03-07T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T08:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=67144"},"modified":"2014-01-08T01:05:46","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T23:05:46","slug":"dual-citizenship-in-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2013\/03\/07\/dual-citizenship-in-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"Dual citizenship in Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Economist March 2nd 2013<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Jus sanguinis revisited<\/span><\/h3>\n

BERLIN<\/p>\n

How not to treat people with more than one passport<\/p>\n

THE case of a woman from Hanau, in Hesse, shows why Kenan Kolat, leader of Germany’s Turks, calls the German citi\u00adzenship law “absurdity cubed.” Born in Germany to Turkish parents, she was a dual citizen. According to the law, she had to relinquish one passport between her 18th and 23rd birthday. She chose to forgo the Turkish one. But the Turkish bureauc\u00adracy was slow, her birthday came and her German citizenship went instead.<\/p>\n

International law has never fully em\u00adbraced multiple citizenship. Many coun\u00adtries frown on it, though others take a more relaxed attitude. Germany, however, man\u00adages to make it especially complicated for citizens of foreign origin. Its traditional ap\u00adproach goes back to a law passed before the first world war. Based on jus sanguinis (“right of blood”), it gave citizenship to any\u00adbody of German descent, but not to for\u00adeigners born in Germany, as countries such as America and France that practise jus soli (“right of soil”) do. Then, in 1999, a centre-left government added the two no\u00adtions together. This would have let a wom\u00adan born in Germany to Turkish parents be simultaneously German and Turkish. But that law coincided with a regional election in Hesse, where the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (cdu) seized on the is\u00adsue to mobilise its conservative base in op\u00adposition. The cdu won the state and took control of the upper. house, where it blocked the new law.<\/p>\n

A compromise was reached in 2000. Children born in Germany to foreign parents after 1990 can get two passports but have to choose one citizenship before they are 23. This year, the first cohort of such children, about 3,300, reach that age. From 2018 the number will reach 40,000 a year or more. There are about half a million such cases all told, more than two-thirds of them of Turkish descent.<\/p>\n

Yet not all young dual citizens must choose. A child born to a German parent in America, say, retains both passports for life. So does a child born to a Greek or Spanish parent in Germany, because dual citizenship is allowed for members of the European Union and Switzerland. This seems unfair to the Turks. This week Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minis\u00adter, said as much to Angela Merkel, Ger\u00admany’s chancellor, during her visit to Tur\u00adkey. (Mrs Merkel also explained that, though happy for Turkey’s eu accession talks to continue, she retained her “scepti\u00adcism” about its ever becoming a member.)<\/p>\n

Besides being unjust and creating two classes of citizens, the law is a nightmare to administer, says Ulrich Kober at Bertels\u00admann Stiftung, a think-tank. Because coun\u00adtries like Iran do not let citizens renounce their citizenship and others make it costly or difficult, German law in theory grants exceptions. But the rules are not clear, reck\u00adons Kay Hailbronner, a lawyer. To make the decisions even more arbitrary, the 16 German states process the paperwork, and each uses different forms.<\/p>\n

\"dualcitizen\"<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
Backing Turkey and Germany together<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

What better way to irritate those citi\u00adzens whom Germany’s politicians say they want to integrate? Mr Kober thinks Germany should simply allow dual citi\u00adzenship. So do the centre-left parties hop\u00ading to replace Mrs Merkel’s government in September’s election, as well as the cdu’s coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party. It may yet happen. \u2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Economist March 2nd 2013 Jus sanguinis revisited BERLIN How not to treat people with more than one passport THE case of a woman from Hanau, in Hesse, shows why Kenan Kolat, leader of Germany’s Turks, calls the German citi\u00adzenship law “absurdity cubed.” Born in Germany to Turkish parents, she was a dual citizen. According […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":67145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[3262,8884],"class_list":["post-67144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-germany","tag-citizenship","tag-kenan-kolat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}