Katja Swider (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Just over half a century ago, on the 25th of November 1975, an estimated 350 000 Dutch citizens lost their citizenship overnight without their consent, and often without their knowledge. They were assigned the citizenship of Suriname, which became independent on the same day, without a referendum. The criteria for segregating previously legally indistinguishable citizens into those who remained Dutch and those who were turned Surinamese were complex, controversial, and often ambiguous, with far-reaching consequences.
Some of these former Dutch citizens reside in the Netherlands today under an illegalised residence status. In response to recent critical media reports and political campaigns about the precarious humanitarian conditions some of them live in, the Dutch government adopted in 2024 a one-off Temporary Regulation. The Regulation created a pathway to regularisation for those who could prove compliance with a list of conditions, and who managed to file an application at a single central office in Amsterdam between January and July 2025.
While this undoubtedly provided a much-needed relief to some, it did not correct all the harms caused by the involuntary mass-denationalisation in 1975. The legal basis and criteria for denationalisation, contained in the international agreement between Suriname and the Netherlands, known as the Separation Agreement (hereafter SA, in Dutch Toescheidingsovereenkomst), remain largely unchallenged. The Court of the Hague, which is exclusively mandated to adjudicate Dutch citizenship cases (hereafter – the Court), still regularly applies the SA to determine whether specific individuals are Dutch citizens.
This blog sheds light on the legal basis for the mass-denationalisation of 1975 and considers a number of recent judgments from the Netherlands, where this law is still in effect. It focuses specifically on the question of individual choices: whose loss of Dutch citizenship was involuntary, who got an opportunity to restore their Dutch citizenship, who could choose to opt for Surinamese citizenship voluntarily, and how the relevant choices, or lack thereof, are given effect by Dutch judges nowadays? Finally, the post considers the potential impact of contemporary national and European legal norms on the application of the 1975 denationalisation laws.
Who lost their Dutch citizenship involuntarily?
Although SA does not explicitly refer to race when formalising criteria for the loss of Dutch citizenship, Guno Jones demonstrates that the process of creation of SA was embedded in an ethno-nationalist discourse. The formal criteria were as follows. Anyone who lived in Suriname on 25 November 1975 and either (1) was born in Suriname themselves, or (2) whose father was born in Suriname, automatically acquired Surinamese citizenship (Arts. 3 & 4). Acquisition of Surinamese citizenship under the SA entailed automatic loss of Dutch citizenship (Art. 2). Dual Dutch/Surinamese citizenship was rejected even for those who had connections with both the European part of the Netherlands and with Suriname – as many did due to colonial ties.
The involuntary nature of the loss of Dutch citizenship in 1975 is still raised by the affected individuals in the Court, as an objection against this loss. One applicant, for example, was born in Suriname in 1970 as a Dutch citizen, and claimed to still be Dutch 55 years later, relying, among others, on the fact that she has never agreed to the loss of her citizenship. The Court confirmed as recently as in 2025 that the lack of consent did not invalidate the automatic loss of Dutch citizenship regulated by the SA.
Who could choose to restore their Dutch citizenship?
Only in rare, exceptional cases were denationalised individuals able to restore their Dutch citizenship. One such exception applied to those whose fathers were not born in Suriname – they could restore their Dutch citizenship within two years (Art. 10). Another exception applied to some minors. The citizenship status of minors generally followed that of their fathers (Art. 6), but minors who “would have obtained or could have obtained or retained” (my translation) a different citizenship if they had been of age in 1975 had an opportunity upon reaching the age of majority to alter their citizenship accordingly, by expressing their will to that end (Art. 6).
The Court, however, interprets the exception for minors restrictively. In three recent rulings all dated 14 January 2025, the applicants were born in Suriname as Dutch citizens, and were two-, four- and fourteen-year-old children living in Suriname in 1975. After reaching the age of majority, they had repeatedly made it known to the Dutch authorities that they wanted to restore their Dutch citizenship. Since they were minors in 1975 when their Dutch citizenship was taken away from them, they argued that the SA granted them a choice to restore their Dutch citizenship upon reaching the age of majority. The Court, however, interpreted the relevant SA article as providing only a very limited “correction option […] for cases in which […] SA leads to a minor child acquiring a different citizenship than they would have acquired if they had already been of age at the time of the [SA] coming into force”. Because the applicants would also have lost their Dutch citizenship in 1975 if they would have been adults at the time, all other circumstances being the same, the Court concluded that they had no right to restore their Dutch citizenship after reaching the age of majority. Similar rulings were also made in 2018 and 2024.
Who could choose to become a Surinamese citizen voluntarily?
Those with a list of specified types of links to Suriname, including getting married or naturalising while living in Suriname, could choose to acquire Surinamese citizenship between 1975 and 1986 if Surinamese citizenship was not automatically assigned to them (Art. 5(1)). Any such acquisition of Surinamese citizenship, whether by choice or automatically, resulted in the automatic loss of Dutch citizenship (Art. 2).
In rulings of 24 November 2021 and 29 September 2022, applicants retained their Dutch citizenship in 1975, but had one of the relevant links to Suriname. In 1976 and 1977, respectively, they signed a seemingly ambiguous form at the Surinamese embassy in the Netherlands. The form had Dutch and Surinamese citizenships listed on it as two options, and presumably the idea was to cross out one of the two options when signing the form, as a way to express a choice to opt for the other citizenship. The applicants did not cross out or otherwise mark any of the two citizenships listed on the form – a fact which was not disputed in court. They reported having always considered themselves Dutch and having never had the intention to renounce their Dutch citizenship. In this case, the Court ruled that by signing that form, even without crossing out the Dutch citizenship, the applicants freely chose to acquire the Surinamese citizenship, and that this resulted in automatic loss of their Dutch citizenship. The Court emphasises the voluntariness of the acquisition of Surinamese citizenship to justify the loss of the Dutch one. These judgments illustrate how something that is framed as a “choice” in SA can, in practice, become a bureaucratic trap if the Court is keen to construct consent on the part of those with links to Suriname as choosing Surinamese citizenship over Dutch citizenship.
National and European legal principles
Unsurprisingly, many applicants affected by the SA have invoked the principles of non-discrimination, legal certainty, and reasonable interpretation of laws to support their claims to retain or restore their Dutch citizenship. However, the Court has rejected those arguments, stating that Dutch citizenship cannot be acquired or retained on the basis of general principles of law.
The CJEU Tjebbes judgment, which established that any loss of EU citizenship ought to be proportionate, inspired some to also ask for an EU proportionality test for the loss of their Dutch citizenship. This line of reasoning has been rejected by the Court for temporal reasons. The loss of citizenship happened, according to the Court, in 1975 – before the introduction of EU citizenship. However, due to the complexity of the SA and bureaucratic deficiencies in its implementation, many individuals have not encountered the fact of loss of their Dutch citizenship until much later than 1975. For example, one person held Dutch passports, voted in national elections, and was treated as a Dutch citizen until 2014, and only in 2022 did the Court definitively confirm that she had, legally speaking, lost her Dutch citizenship in 1975. Can, in such a case, the moment of loss of citizenship still be reasonably considered to be 1975?
According to the ECHR decision in Alpeyeva, when human rights are at stake, the practical effects of possession or loss of citizenship outweigh the technicalities of the national legal procedures governing it. Combining the CJEU and ECHR jurisprudence on citizenship, those affected by the SA who were in practice treated as Dutch citizens until after 1995 may find support in the EU principle of proportionality to challenge the loss of their Dutch (and EU) citizenship on the basis of the Tjebbes ruling. While EU law does not disallow involuntary loss of EU citizenship in general, the requirement to conduct a personalised assessment of individual circumstances in each case makes automatic loss of citizenship extremely complex to implement in the EU.
Conclusion
The formal decolonisation of Suriname came at the cost of involuntary denationalisation of Dutch citizens with links to Suriname, all of whom had previously held a Dutch citizenship status legally indistinguishable from any other citizen. To the extent the SA allowed any choice to the affected individuals, it applied double standards for choosing to restore Dutch citizenship (conditional primarily upon the father’s birth outside of Suriname) and for choosing to acquire Surinamese citizenship (conditional upon having one of the broadly defined types of ties to Suriname). When denying recognition of Dutch citizenship to those who lost it involuntarily due to the SA, the Court confirms that consent is irrelevant for the loss of Dutch citizenship. However, when justifying the loss of Dutch citizenship due to voluntary acquisition of the Surinamese one, the Court justifies the loss by emphasising that the individuals concerned exercised a choice, even when the form in which this choice was expressed is questionable.
While awareness of the ongoing harms of colonialism is rising in the Netherlands, and some steps have been taken to address it, the SA is still valid law in the Dutch legal order. Contemporary national and European norms on human rights, citizenship, proportionality, and non-discrimination, while not requiring states to generally respect individual citizenship choices, may play a role in promoting a more critical and human rights-sensitive application of the SA to contemporary citizenship disputes.
It is beyond the scope of this blog to discuss whether the loss of Dutch citizenship is an acceptable price for decolonisation and, if so, who exactly should pay that price. However, it is important to note that immediate, automatic and involuntary loss of Dutch citizenship was not the only possible way to formally decolonise Suriname. Other citizenship constructions have been proposed at the time by representatives of the Surinamese community in the Netherlands, including opportunities for dual Dutch/Surinamese citizenships, longer transition periods, and more space for individual choices. Those proposals were, however, rejected by the state officials. The degree of disregard for the agency of affected individuals as to whether and how they wished to stop being Dutch citizens was a political choice, and not a decolonial necessity.
With many thanks to Prof. Guno Jones for the insightful discussions that led to the writing of this piece.