Acquisition and Loss of Nationality

Natac: acquisition and Loss of Nationality

From summer 2004 to the end of 2005 an international network of researchers has analysed the rules and practices regulating the acquisition and loss of nationality in the fifteen ‘old’ EU Member States. The results of this EU-funded project with the acronym NATAC (The acquisition of nationality in EU Member States: rules, practices and quantitative developments) are published in two volumes by Amsterdam University Press.
The first volume consists of comparative reports on specific modes of acquiring and losing nationality, on nationality statistics, on European trends in nationality legislation and on statuses of ‘denizenship’ and ‘quasi-citizenship’. It also contains an account of the comparative methodology that has been developed specifically for this project, a chapter on international and European law and an assessment of the implementation of nationality law from the perspective of NGOs counselling immigrants who apply for naturalisation.
The second volume consists of chapters that provide in-depth analyses of each country in our sample.
An executive summary and the recommendations resulting from the project are available here . A policy brief can be found here.
In all modesty we claim that these two volumes represent the most comprehensive comparative study on nationality in Europe so far. However, we are perfectly aware that there is more to be done. First, ongoing reform will quickly require updates for some of our data. Second, we have not fully explored all possibilities for further comparative analyses of our data. Since we want to make our data useable by other researchers, this website makes available additional material.