Background:

Finnish nationality law may observe the ius soli principle in cases where the citizenship of the parent cannot be passed to a child, or is unknown. A child acquires Finnish citizenship by birth if the child is born in Finland and does not acquire the citizenship of any foreign state at birth, and does not even have a secondary right to acquire the citizenship of any other foreign state. According to the Nationality Act of Finland (359/2003), the Finnish Immigration Service determines the citizenship status of a child born in Finland to foreign parents to make sure that the child does not remain stateless after birth.

Recently, the Finnish Immigration Service has reported cases where the conditions under which Iraqi citizenship is passed to children, as per current Iraqi law, are unclear. In this context, the Finnish Immigration Service Nationality Process launched this query to request information from other EMN Member and Observer Countries regarding their approach to cases where passing citizenship of an Iraqi mother to a child is uncertain.

Respondents:

20 EMN Member and Observer Countries provided a public answer to this ad hoc query.

Findings:

A preliminary analysis of the results of the ad hoc query shows that:

• The issue of whether a child born on their territory from an Iraqi mother automatically acquires Iraqi nationality is determined by Iraqi law, not by the law of the country. Therefore, authorities of responding countries will consider the applicable legislation and any provided documents in their ascertainment of whether a child born to foreign parents obtains their nationality.

• Most countries have provisions in place to prevent children being born on their territory to become stateless, even if they apply the ius sanguinis principle. This is the case in BE for instance, where Article 10 of the Belgian Nationality Code stipulates that a child born in BE who does not possess any other nationality is Belgian.

• Most countries report that they have not (or very seldom) been confronted with cases similar to those described by FI. Consequently, not a lot of relevant experience can be drawn from the responses to this ad hoc query.

For further details, please read the compilation of answers attached above.