Backing Turkey and Germany together THE case of a woman from Hanau, in Hesse, shows why Kenan Kolat, leader of Germany’s Turks, calls the German citizenship 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 bureaucracy was slow, her birthday came—and her German citizenship went instead.International law has never fully embraced multiple citizenship. Many countries frown on it, though others take a more relaxed attitude. Germany, however, manages to make it especially complicated for citizens of foreign origin. Its traditional approach goes back to a law passed before the first world war. Based on jus sanguinis (“right of blood”), it gave citizenship to anybody of German descent, but not to foreigners born in Germany, as countries such as America and France that practice jus soli (“right of soil”) do. Then, in 1999, a centre-left government added the two notions together. This would have let a woman born in Germany to…
