Netherlands Authorised 2,200 Naturalisation Applications Under Amnesty Arrangement

May 12, 2022

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The Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) has handled a total of 3,250 applications for
naturalisation filed from RANOV permit holders (Regulation on Settlement of the Legacy of the Old
Aliens Act) between June 1, 2021, and May 1, 2022, the authority has revealed.

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More specifically, such a permit is issued to third-country nationals who have been living in the country
for too long, with the condition that those have been residents in the Netherlands since April 1, 2001,
SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
According to a press release by IND, 2,200 naturalisation applications submitted by this category have
been authorised, and 50 were rejected for various reasons, while this new change concerns both RANOV
permit holders who were adults when they obtained their RANOV permits and RANOV permit holders
who obtained their RANOV permits as minors.

“People with a RANOV permit obtained several exemptions in 2021, enabling them to apply for Dutch
citizenship. Since June 1, 2021, these have applied to those who were minors at the time (approximately
2,000) and since November 1 to those who were adults at the time (approximately 8,000),” the press
release explains.

It also emphasises that these categories are exempted from the requirement to submit a birth
certificate, registration, or valid foreign passport. In addition, this group is no longer required to
renounce their original nationality.

Explaining further, a person must have lived in the Netherlands with a valid residence permit for five or
more years without leaving the country and not be considered a danger to public order or national
security. Another requirement is to meet the requirement of participating in a municipal or civic
integration programme, and an application can be refused if there are obvious doubts about someone’s
whereabouts.

Those who get their applications denied can object to the decision and appeal against it, while their right
of residence in the Netherlands will remain applicable.

Previously, the European Office for Statistics, Eurostat, revealed that the Netherlands was the third
country to record the highest naturalisation rate in 2020, as it has granted 4.8 citizenships per 100 non-
national residents.

It falls behind Sweden and Portugal, which issued 8.6 and 5.5 citizenships for 100 resident non-nationals,
while other countries like Finland (2.6 citizenships per 100 resident non-nationals), Italy (2.6), Spain
(2.4), and Belgium (2.4), were honourable mentions.

“The naturalisation rate is the ratio of the number of persons who acquired the citizenship of a country
during a year over the stock of non-national residents in the same country at the beginning of the year,”
Eurostat explains.
However, the lowest naturalisation rates in the EU were registered in the Baltic countries, with Latvia
and Estonia granting 0.4 naturalisation permits while Lithuania had even lower numbers (0.2).