I am Australian by birth. My son was born here in CH and received Australian citizenship by descent . Now he has a child born here. Does anybody know if its then possible for his child to get Australian citizenship?
…have him rob a bank, worked for some of my ancestors.
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I believe that for your son to be able to pass that citizenship on to his child he needs to have spent a certain amount of time living in Australia.
I’m not sure how long that is (maybe two or three years?) but the same applies for UK nationals born abroad if they want to pass on their citizenship.
Your best bet would be to ask the Australian consulate here.
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To me, somehow it sounds a bit daft to me … parent are aussies. Born in CH to aussie parents. CH will not grant citizenship-by-birth. If AUS does not grant him citizenship, and he does not have a CH passport, what citizenship will he have?
I don’t think the OP’s wife is also an Aussie so his son will have a second citizenship from her which he may be able to pass on to the child. The child’s mother should also he able to pass her citizenship on to the child do the child is not going to be stateless.
In UK you can get citizenship by descent, but those who get it that way can’t give their kids citizenship by descent. Not sure if Australia copied this rule.
Interesting, what if a family lives in generations as permanent residents without another nationality
Your son has to have lived in AUS for 2+ years to pass citizenship on.
Let’s say the parents are both British by descent and have a child in Switzerland, the child would technically be stateless at birth and has no passport and cannot travel.
The parent’s would have to apply to the UK under special measures to get citizenship for the child.
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Nah. If both parents are British, the baby is British, regardless.
Edit - Oh wait - you mean if the baby is of parents that are both second gen British?
Nope. As I said, if you are British by descent, then you do not pass on your nationality automatically.
I see so at least there’s an emergency option like this.
I’ve talked to Gemini about it and according to it, it was originally to battle having too many claims for the British nationality in the ex-British Empire, and also due to the nationality seen more as of a civic contract than a blood line privilege
Possibly, but is it in the child’s best interest?
Yes it seems like that. Hard to get info online.
This happened to friends of ours in Belgium about 20 years ago.
Their son was born in Belgium but although both his parents were British neither of them were born in the UK so he wasn’t automatically given British citizenship at birth and they had to jump through some hoops before he got it.
It wasn’t difficult since they’d both lived for many years in the uk but it was time consuming and expensive getting all the documentation together to prove it.
In the meantime he was granted temporary Belgian citizenship by the Belgians as they wouldn’t allow him to be stateless.
The info is all there and easy to find on the official government website.
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/citizenship/become-a-citizen/by-descent#Eligibility
There’s a UN convention on statelessness so countries signed up to this should not allow people to become stateless. However, implementations vary. I think for Switzerland they allow facilitated naturalization after 5 years - pretty useless IMO and in the scenario could leave the child/parents stuck for maybe 6-7 years for this process to complete if they didn’t have another avenue.