European citizenship is the fundamental status of EU Member State nationals. What, then, are the implications when a state deprives a European citizen of his or her nationality? A new project funded by the European Commission’s DG Justice and coordinated by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in collaboration with Maastricht University, as core partner of the EUDO CITIZENSHIP Observatory, aims to investigate this under-researched field. The ILEC project (Involuntary Loss of European Citizenship: Exchanging Knowledge and Identifying Guidelines for Europe) will carry out a comparative study of the law and practices governing loss of nationality across the 27 member states plus Croatia. A key question it seeks to answer is what impact the development of European citizenship is having on national competences covering the acquisition and loss of nationality in light of increasing jurisprudence from the Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights. The project held its kick-off meeting on March 11th at CEPS, bringing together the ILEC project partners, including in addition to CEPS and Maastricht University, the European University Institute, the University of Liege, the Danish Institute of Human Rights, the University of Leon and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (Budapest).