Jus sanguinis
[citation needed] This principle contrasts with jus soli ('right of soil'), which is solely based on the place of birth.
Some countries provide that a child acquires the nationality of the mother if the father is unknown or stateless, and some irrespective of the place of birth.
[13] Renan's republican conception (with perhaps the presence of a German-speaking population in Alsace-Lorraine) explain France's early adoption of jus soli.
For example, the United States grants citizenship based on jus soli to almost all people born within its borders, and also grants citizenship based on jus sanguinis to children born outside its borders to U.S. citizen parents subject to the parents meeting certain residency or physical presence criteria.
States offering jus sanguinis rights to ethnic citizens and their descendants include Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Armenia, Hungary and Romania.
At one time, ethnic Germans living abroad in a country in the former Eastern Bloc (Aussiedler) could obtain citizenship through a virtually automatic procedure.
Both paragraphs (1) and (2) result in a considerable number of Poles and Israelis, residing in Poland and Israel respectively, being concurrently German.
In addition, the "Status Law" of 2001 grants certain privileges to ethnic Hungarians living in territories that were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In a 2005 verdict, the Supreme Administrative Court of Poland ruled that this action was illegal based on the state of law at that time.
To obtain Swiss citizenship, people in this position must undergo naturalisation proceedings, which have a high bar to satisfy the "integration" criterion.
The unusual rules hit international headlines in 2017 when a woman born in Switzerland to Turkish parents, who is a native Swiss-German speaker and has spent her entire life in Switzerland, had her citizenship application denied by the local municipality on "integration" grounds as she could not name enough Swiss mountains, cheeses and retail brands, and was deemed not to have gone skiing often enough.
[43] In 2017, Swiss voters in a nationwide referendum agreed to relax the citizenship criteria for third-generation immigrants slightly: although they will still not be Swiss citizens at birth and will need to apply for citizenship, they will no longer have to take naturalisation tests or interviews if their parents and grandparents are long-time permanent residents.
This approach has been a tradition since the new constitutional foundation of Bulgaria in 1879, following the liberation from Ottoman yoke in 1878, when large numbers of ethnic Bulgarians remained outside of the state borders.
Converts to Judaism who wish to immigrate to Israel are evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the Israeli Interior Ministry, which determines whether the conversion was sincere in its view.
Minor children of Italian citizens were at risk of losing Italian citizenship if the child's parent naturalized in another country, unless the child was subject to an exception to this risk—and children born and residing in a country where they held dual citizenship by jus soli were subject to such an exception since 1 July 1912.
