JAJ wrote:I assume the child was born outside Australia.
As far as Australia is concerned, you applied for your child to become an Australian citizen, not to confirm that Australian citizenship was already acquired. Your child's citizenship certificate ought to make clear the date of acquisition of Australian citizenship - I wouldn't expect it to be date of birth.
As a result, if the child was born an Austrian citizen, acquisition of Australian citizenship might have caused loss of Austrian citizenship. Some countries that restrict dual citizenship have special rules for children who acquire a foreign citizenship, others treat children the same as adults.
You should consult an Austrian immigration lawyer.
Was the child born in the U.K.? Child may be British if one of you has U.K. permanent resident status.
Hi all,
I wanted to update how this ended. It turned out that JAJ was pretty much on the money about the reason for the problem. It's true that the children were born outside of Australia and therefore had to apply for Australian citizenship. Although getting that was a formality, the fact that the kids were not Australian at birth, only once their application was approved, was meaningful to the Austrian authorities. Austria, like a few other countries, has a very pure form of
ius sanguinis (the blood law; Abstammungsprinzip) which means that citizenship is acquired automatically by children of Austrian citizens even if the child is born outside Austria, can be retained for generations outside of Austria this way, but can be lost forever at any time that a new citizenship is acquired after birth.
Luckily, there was a technicality that worked in our favour. The kids' Australian citizenship by descent applications required only the signature of one parent. Since I'm the Australian citizen I did the signing and my wife (the Austrian citizen) never signed the forms. The Austrian embassy in London asked us to retrieve the forms on Freedom of Information from Australia, which we managed to get hold of after a couple of months. Because my wife never signed those forms, the Austrian department of citizenship was able to work the argument that the Australian citizenship had been applied for without her approval and therefore it was disproportionate to deny the children Austrian citizenship. It took them 7 months and some pushing by the Volksanwaltschaft (citizen legal service) to get that decision, but in the end we've been lucky.
For the benefit of others expecting a child with the prospect of dual citizenship where one country uses
ius sanguinis, what we've since found out is that the way we should have gone about things was to get confirmation of the Austrian citizenship first, then after that ask for permission to have the Australian citizenship as well for the benefit of the child. Apparently this is normally granted if confirmation of the Austrian citizenship has been acquired first. I'd assume this would be similar for Germany and some other countries as well, though please check the embassies concerned.
