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Lying about nationality can leave one stateless, EU court rules
Mar 2, 2010, 11:27 GMT
Luxembourg - People who lie to obtain a new nationality can lose it when they get found out, even if they risk becoming stateless as a result, the European Union's Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday.
'A member state of the European Union may withdraw its nationality, granted by way of naturalization, from a citizen of the union, when that person has obtained it by deception,' the court said in a statement.
The judgement refers to the case of Janko Rottmann, an Austrian national by birth who broke German laws by not declaring he had been investigated by Austrian authorities before he successfully applied to become a German citizen.
When it found out, the German state of Bavaria decreed that his citizenship should be withdrawn with retroactive effect. That left Rottmann in a bind, as he had lost his Austrian citizenship by becoming German, and was not due to regain it automatically as a result of his German nationality being annulled.
Rottmann appealed, leading the German federal administrative court to ask the court for its opinion.
EU judges decreed that the German authorities' decisions were justified in principle, but they stressed that the punishment inflicted on Rottmann must be 'proportionate' to the seriousness of the offence he committed.
Therefore it is now up to German administrative judges, they added, to decide whether Rottmann should be given 'a reasonable period of time in order to try to recover the nationality of his member state of origin,' before his German identity documents are taken from him.
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