Loss of citizenship

Loss of citizenship, also referred to as loss of nationality, is the event of ceasing to be a citizen of a country under the nationality law of that country. It is a blanket term covering both involuntary loss of citizenship such as through denaturalization, as well as voluntary renunciation of citizenship.

There are generally two categories of grounds for loss of citizenship. "Involuntary loss" may occur either due to automatic lapse of citizenship from the citizen for failure to take some action to retain citizenship, or due to active withdrawal of citizenship by the country. "Voluntary loss", often called "relinquishment" or "renunciation", is in contrast initiated by the citizen. It is not always easy to make a clean distinction between the two categories: loss of citizenship due to an initial cause undertaken voluntarily (for example, voluntarily serving in a foreign military or voluntarily naturalising as a citizen of a foreign country) could be seen either as "voluntary loss" or "involuntary loss".

The European Union Democracy Observatory, in a study of the nationality laws of thirty-three European countries, found nine broadly-defined cases in which a citizen of a country may lose his or her citizenship:

Involuntary loss of citizenship does not necessarily mean automatic and immediate loss. Even if a country's laws state that under certain circumstances citizenship is automatically removed, until officials of the government or embassy are informed, that country's government will probably still retain that person's name in its citizenship records.

Various international treaties limit the cases in which loss of nationality may occur. In most cases this limits the government's power to deprive the individual of citizenship, but this also may limit the individual's ability to voluntarily make themselves stateless. Article 7 of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness provides that "[l]aws for the renunciation of a nationality shall be conditional upon a person's acquisition or possession of another nationality". However, this is not considered a peremptory norm which binds non-signatories to the Convention.

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