The Netherlands Shut the Door on Her, but This Moroccan Woman Secured the Right to Return
Born and raised in the Netherlands, a Moroccan woman who lost her Dutch nationality will be able to return to the country. The courts rejected a condition added by the administration and ordered the immediate issuance of her long-stay visa.
The woman, born in 1980 in the Netherlands, obtained Dutch nationality while she was a minor, after her parents were naturalized in 1990. At the same time, she retained her Moroccan nationality.
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Having lived in Morocco since July 2009, she subsequently lost her Dutch nationality. In October 2023, she applied for a provisional residence permit in order to return to the Netherlands as a former Dutch national born and raised in the country.
The immigration authorities rejected her application. They considered that the Moroccan woman could not benefit from this procedure because she had not been born Dutch, having acquired the nationality only during her childhood.
A condition absent from the law
The Hague District Court found that the legislation only requires a person to be a former Dutch national who was born and raised in the Netherlands. No higher-ranking legal provision requires that the person have held this nationality from birth, the ruling issued in this case specifies.
The condition invoked by the administration appeared only in the title of a circular and in its explanatory notice. In the court’s view, this interpretation unlawfully added a requirement to the regulatory text and therefore had to be set aside.
The Moroccan woman had also pointed out that her brother, who was in the same situation, had obtained his residence permit. The ministry argued that this decision had resulted from an administrative error. The judge rejected this argument and recognized a violation of the principle of equality.
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Considering that all the legal conditions had been met, the court did not simply ask the ministry to reconsider the case. It annulled the refusal and ordered the immediate issuance of a long-stay visa on the grounds of non-temporary humanitarian reasons. The state will also have to reimburse the legal costs and pay 1 868 euros in procedural costs.