1m Turks at risk of losing German citizenship, media reports

Some one million Turks are at risk of losing their German citizenship because authorities believe they hold dual nationality which was obtained after they were naturalised, duvaR reported.

Germany’s Interior Minister of State of North Rhine Westphalia sent a circular asking municipalities for identifying those who became German citizens after 2000 and to check if they had subsequently obtained a Turkish nationality. Germany’s post-2000 law made it possible for the country to withdraw citizenship from those who had taken up another nationality following their naturalisation in Germany. The rule does not apply to nationals of EU member states.

About a million Turks are threatened with losing their nationality as they are accused of knowingly violating the German citizenship laws, the report says.

Of those 112,211 naturalised German citizens in 2017, almost 39,000 came from EU member states and 99 per cent kept their original nationality, according to a DW report.

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In Germany, German-Turks are often the focus of the dual-nationality discussion, they are the third largest group of dual citizens with 530,000 holding two passports.

German law generally discourages dual citizenship, but it does not always require that applicants renounce their citizenship before becoming German.

According to the Federal Statistics Office, out of the 73 million Germans in the country, around 4.3 million people hold at least one other citizenship.