When Nobel Prize winner Andre Geim accepted his British knighthood years ago, he probably didn’t expect it would cost him his Dutch citizenship.
According to the NOS, the 66-year-old physicist has been ordered to surrender his Dutch passport after taking British nationality no less than 12 years ago.
The price of becoming ‘Sir’
Geim, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics alongside his student for discovering graphene, has found himself in an unexpected bureaucratic bind.
To receive his British knighthood and the coveted ‘Sir’ title, he was required to become a British citizen. What he didn’t realise was that this would automatically trigger the loss of his Dutch nationality.
“I wasn’t aware of the consequences for my Dutch nationality at the time,” Geim tells the NOS.
The Russian-born scientist, who worked in the Netherlands during the 1990s, recently received a stark email from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding he hand over his passport at the Dutch embassy in London.
And if he refuses? Interpol will get involved.
Fighting for exceptional status
Geim has hired an Amsterdam law firm to help him and the legal team has appealed to the IND, citing “exceptional circumstances.” They argue that keeping the Nobel laureate as a Dutch citizen would serve “the interest of the Dutch state.”
Geim also argues that his choice to become a British citizen wasn’t truly “voluntary,” since it was a requirement in order to receive the knighthood. “That makes my choice less voluntary, I think,” he tells the NOS.
It’s a compelling case: this is a world-renowned scientist who has been appointed Commander in the Order of the Dutch Lion and who was a distinguished professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen.
But The Hague can’t be swayed. Dutch dual citizenship rules are notoriously strict, and, according to Geim, the authorities have decided that they have “no interest” in maintaining the physicist’s Dutch nationality.
A decade-long oversight
Perhaps most puzzling is why authorities waited over 12 years to act.
Technically, Dutch citizenship law automatically revokes nationality once you’ve acquired another — yet somehow this Nobel laureate slipped through the cracks for over a decade.
While Geim says he feels his rights have been violated and is saddened by the loss, his story highlights the unforgiving nature of Dutch nationality law — even for Nobel laureates.
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There are exceptions in which Dutch nationals may retain their Dutch nationality. One of them is if a Dutch national is married to someone who holds the other country’s citizenship. The same exception works in reverse. My husband is a Dutch national who lived in the US for 35 years. During that time, he maintained his Dutch passport and eventually gained US citizenship. Now that we live in the Netherlands, I, too, am a dual citizen (US born/Dutch naturalized) due to the same exception. There are two other categories of exceptions: if rescinding the other country’s nationality is cost prohibitive; or if the country of their birth prohibits rescinding of their citizenship.
No one _has_ to receive silly “knighthood” from the Germans-turned-purported-English playing the charade of being Britigh sovereigns. One does it for prestige and at times cash and one has to live with consequences. The only citizenship once gets to keep for life safely is the one you had at birth (usually also the country you were born with, but not always).
So he has already lost his Dutch citizenship and there is nothing he can do. Leave it at that.
No big deal really. Many people have no nationality rights yet many of the privileged Europeans have two or three! Rules reign and whether we like it or not we can research them at all times so I find this a hugely odd complaint.
For the Dutch to brusquely rescind his nationality is quite lame but like everything, we MUST feel that there are other factors at stake here of which we have not been told.
Nothing is what it seems – in Hollywood and in real life.