Polish nationality law

Polish nationality law is based primarily on the principle of jus sanguinis. Children born to at least one Polish parent acquire Polish citizenship irrespective of place of birth.

Citizenship by marriage

Entering into a marriage with a Polish citizen does not constitute a sufficient basis for obtaining Polish citizenship. In order to obtain such citizenship, a foreigner has to meet additional specific conditions concerning their legal and uninterrupted stay in Poland. A foreigner may be recognized as a Polish citizen if he remains married to a Polish citizen for a period of at least 3 years and has stayed in Poland legally and uninterruptedly for at least 2 years under a permanent residence permit, and their knowledge of Polish language is documented. However, in order to obtain a permanent residence permit in Poland, one has first to obtain a temporary residence permit based on marriage to a Polish citizen.

It is possible to obtain a permit for permanent or temporary residence in Poland, provided that you intend to reside in Poland and not in another country. You will not be able to obtain a temporary or permanent residence permit in Poland if you intend to live in a different country.

Polish citizenship may also be obtained in the course of the procedure of granting Polish citizenship by the President of the Republic of Poland. The decision of the President is not limited by any conditions that the foreigner should meet in order to be granted Polish citizenship. This means that the President may grant Polish citizenship to any foreigner, regardless of such conditions as the duration of his stay in Poland. It is worth noting that the procedure for granting Polish citizenship by the President may take quite long, because the provisions of the Administrative Procedure Code do not apply to such cases. This means that even if it is possible to review the case based on the evidence presented by the applicant, it does not have to be considered immediately as in the case of recognizing a foreigner as a Polish citizen. Individuals applying for citizenship are obliged to substantiate their application and to provide important reasons why they should be granted Polish citizenship.

Citizenship by birth

Polish passport – issued to Polish citizens to travel outside the EU

A child born to a Polish parent is a Polish citizen at birth. This applies whether the child is born in Poland or elsewhere.

Children born or found in Poland acquire Polish citizenship when both parents are unknown, or when their citizenship cannot be established, or if determined to be stateless. Polish citizenship is bestowed upon stateless children over sixteen years of age only with their consent.[1]

Citizenship by naturalization

The current law is the Polish Citizenship Act of 2 April 2009,[2] which was published on 14 February 2012, and became law in its entirety on 15 August 2012.

According to this act, a foreigner may acquire Polish citizenship in the following ways:

  1. By granting. This category allows the President of Poland to grant Polish citizenship to any foreigner who asks for it.
  2. By recognition. A foreigner is recognized as Polish, if they ask for it, know the Polish language, are not a security risk, and meet one of the following criteria:
    • Lived in Poland for the last 3 years as a permanent resident, and have a stable and regular source of income, and own or rent an apartment or house.
    • Lived in Poland, legally, for the last 10 years, and currently have a permanent resident status, and have a stable and regular source of income, and own or rent an apartment or house.
    • Lived in Poland for the last 2 years as a permanent resident, and have been married to a Polish citizen for the last 3 years.
    • Lived in Poland for the last 2 years as a permanent resident, and are stateless.
    • Lived in Poland for the last 2 years as a refugee.
    • Lived in Poland for the last 2 years as a repatriate.
  3. By restoration. Applies to people who lost Polish citizenship before 1 January 1999.

Citizenship by descent

Citizenship can generally be claimed only by descendants of Polish citizens. However, because the newly independent Poland comprised lands from Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, who became a Polish citizen was unclear. The Polish Citizenship Act of 1920 referred back to the residency laws of these former states, and also "international treaties". Polish Citizenship Act of 1920, Article 2 Those without a right to Polish citizenship were considered to have only "Polish origins" but not citizenship. Polish Citizenship Act of 1920, Article 2a Thus, not all ethnic Poles could claim Polish citizenship if they had left Poland before the country became an independent state in 1918. Also, there can be no break in Polish citizenship between the emigrant ancestor and the descendant. If the applicant's ancestor lost Polish citizenship, such as by becoming a citizen of another country before 1951, the descendant did not inherit Polish citizenship through that ancestor. Application for "Confirmation of Possession or Loss of Polish Citizenship" can be made through Polish embassies or consulates abroad.[3]

Polish migrants before 1962

Special rules exist concerning the acquisition and loss of Polish citizenship before 1962:

Loss of Polish citizenship

Since 1962, Polish law (including the Constitution) does not allow the government to revoke someone's citizenship. Renunciation of Polish citizenship requires a petition with extensive supporting documentation subject to the approval of the President of Poland.[5] Administrative processing of the petition can take up to several years and the President's decision is final and cannot be appealed in court.

Starting in 1968, the former communist regime initiated an anti-Semitic campaign that forced out of Poland from 15,000 to 20,000 Polish Jews, who were stripped of their Polish citizenship.[6]

Their Polish passports confiscated, replaced with a ‘travel document’ that did not allow them to return, and their properties expropriated by the state, the mostly Holocaust survivors and their children emigrated to Israel, the United States, Denmark and Sweden.

The High Court in Warsaw accepted a petition filed by Baruch-Natan Yagil, who was forced to leave Poland in 1968, and ruled that the Polish government erred in revoking the plaintiff's citizenship, and should restore it, and issue him a Polish passport.

During a 2006 visit to Israel, President Lech Kaczyński promised to restore Polish citizenship. No blanket legislation covering the issue exists, but an when applying for the confirmation of their Polish citizenship, these Jews and their offsprings will usually get a positive result in the first instance or the second one, in an appeal to the ministry of interior.

Jews and Israelis who were invited to Warsaw to mark the 40th anniversary of Poland's purging of the Jews on March 8, 1968, will be given back the Polish citizenship.

Loss Criteria

The different principles of the law governing this issue follow:  

  1. A person born before the 1951 law entered into force may inherit only the Polish citizenship of their father if their parents were married.  
  2. The following actions taken before January 19, 1951, resulted in the loss of Polish citizenship:
    1. joining a foreign army (even if the person never actually wore uniform or served but was only conscripted on paper)
    2. joining a work position of a public nature in a foreign country (a very wide and volatile definition for this, including teaching and working in any authority that was state owned in that period in Poland, like post etc.)
    3. acquiring any foreign citizenship (only if the man was exempt from Polish army duty). If a married man, the loss also affected his wife and minor children (younger than 18). Therefore, adult women had lost their citizenship obtaining foreign citizenship before 1951, because they had no military duty in Poland On the other hand, in the case of men there are two conditions which need to coexist: Men who both got foreign citizenship and had passed the age of military duty (50 since the law had changed on May 29, 1950) had lost their citizenship. In any case, foreign citizenship will cause the loss of an adult’s Polish citizenship only if they was naturalized. Those who obtained citizenship by birth ( in USA, Israel, even if born in Palestine and got Israeli citizenship once the state was established etc.), did not lose their Polish citizenship.  
  3. A person who obtained foreign citizenship (non Polish) due to the changes of the borders after WWII, or had Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian citizenship in 1951 had lost his Polish citizenship (see clause 4 of the second law). Nonetheless, if the ex-Pole returned to Poland afterwards due to the different agreements of repatriation that had been signed between the Soviet Union and Poland (e.g. in 1945 and 1956), they regained his Polish citizenship. In fact, every Pole that became a Soviet citizen and did not take advantage of that opportunity to come back to Poland in relation with those agreements, lost their Polish citizenship.  
  4. In order to confirm the citizenship of a person who left before 1951, it will be easier to prove that they left Poland after the first law from 1920 had entered into force. Otherwise it will be difficult to prove their Polish citizenship. If their parents stayed in Poland it might help.
  5. The laws from 1920 and 1962 allow for citizenship to pass from father to his child only if the father’s paternity has been declared within one year from birth. Hence, an illegitimate child with only a Polish father and not mother born during in the period when these two laws were in force, must show either a birth certificate with the father's details or a paternity declaration, both must be signed before they turned one year old (the declaration is usually given in the hospital, while registering as the newborn's father). In Israel, such declaration is saved in the archives of the Ministry of Interior and a copy can be requested.
  6. The issue of citizenship of children whose parents had different nationalities was regulated not only in the provisions of the Act on Polish Citizenship, but also in the international agreements ratified by Poland in the field of citizenship. This means that, in such a case, the provisions of the Polish Citizenship Act were not applied. In the 60s and the 70s Poland signed with some countries of the Central and Eastern Europe the conventions on avoidance of multiple nationality from which withdrew in the 90s and 2000s.[7]

Visa free travel

Visa requirements for Polish citizens

Visa requirements for Polish citizens are administrative entry restrictions by the authorities of other states placed on citizens of Poland. In 2014, Polish citizens had visa-free or visa on arrival access to 157 countries and territories, ranking the Polish passport 14th in the world according to the Visa Restrictions Index.

Dual citizenship

Polish law does not explicitly allow dual citizenship, but possession of another citizenship is tolerated since there are no penalties for its possession alone.[8] However, penalties do exist for exercising foreign citizenship, such as identifying oneself to Polish authorities using a foreign identification document. Serving in a foreign military does not require permission of Polish military authorities, if the person resides in that foreign country and has its citizenship.[9]

Poland treats nationals of other countries whom it considers Polish citizens as if they were solely Polish. Because Polish citizenship is determined by the citizenship of a Polish parent - without any explicit limitation for the number of generations elapsed abroad for descendants of Polish emigrants - this may create problems for individuals of Polish descent born abroad who, in spite of having no ties to Poland, are nevertheless subject to all obligations of Polish citizenship, formerly including military service (Poland suspended compulsory military service on December 5, 2008 by the order of the Minister of Defence and compulsory military service was formally abolished when the Polish parliament amended conscription law on January 9, 2009; the law came into effect on February 11.). In addition, such individuals are not entitled to consular protection of their home country under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The only exception is when a bilateral consular agreement calls for recognition of the expatriate citizenship, regardless of the allegations of Polish citizenship raised by Poland. Such an agreement was negotiated in the 1972 Consular Convention between the United States and Poland[10] providing that:

"Persons entering the Republic of Poland for temporary visits on the basis of United States passports containing Polish entry visas will, in the period for which temporary visitor status has been accorded (in conformity with the visa's validity), be considered United States citizens by the appropriate Polish authorities for the purpose of ensuring the consular protection provided for in Article 29 of the Convention and the right of departure without further documentation, regardless of whether they may possess the citizenship of the Republic of Poland."

However, since Poland abolished visa requirements for United States citizens in 1991, this provision no longer applies.

The problems resulting for members of the Polish diaspora, Polonia, from being treated by Poland solely as Polish citizens are compounded by the difficulty to renounce Polish citizenship (see above).

Poland has been enforcing with varying stringency its claims to citizenship allegiance from descendants of Polish emigrants and from recent refugees from Polish Communism who became naturalized in other countries. Under a particularly strict enforcement policy, named by the Polish expatriate community the "passport trap", citizens of the United States, Canada, and Australia were prevented from leaving Poland until they obtain a Polish passport.[11] The governments of the United States and Canada have issued travel warnings for Poland, still in effect in February 2007, to those "who are or can be claimed as Polish citizens"[12] that they are required to "enter and exit Poland on a Polish passport" and will not be "allowed to leave Poland until a new Polish passport has been obtained".[8]

Travellers to Poland who have Polish ancestors are advised to obtain in writing a statement from a Polish Consulate as to whether or not they will face any obligations in Poland, such as military service, taxation, or the requirement to obtain a Polish passport.[11]

In December 2007 Poland established a Polish Charter which can grant some rights of Polish citizenship to people of Polish descent who do not have Polish citizenship and who reside in ex-USSR.[13]

Citizenship of the European Union

Polish citizens are also citizens of the European Union and thus enjoy rights of free movement and have the right to vote in elections for the European Parliament.

Notes and references

  1. ↑ "ELIGIBILITY TO ACQUIRE POLISH CITIZENSHIP". polishcitizenship.net. Archived from the original on 2009-05-23.
  2. ↑ Polish Citizenship Act of 2 April 2009
  3. ↑ Polish Citizenship, Consul General of the Republic of Poland in New York.
  4. ↑ 1951 Polish Citizenship Act (translated to English)
  5. ↑ Dziennik Ustaw: March 20, 2000
  6. ↑ "Poland to return citizenship to purged Jews". 5 March 2008.
  7. ↑ List of States Parties to the conventions on the avoidance of cases of multiple nationality accessed on June 3, 2017
  8. 1 2 Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada: Travel Report, Poland accessed on Feb 17, 2007
  9. ↑ "Strona nie istnieje [404]".
  10. ↑ U.S. Department of State: Poland Bilateral, 24 U.S.T. 1231, May 31, 1972
  11. 1 2 Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada: Dual Citizenship: What Travellers Should Know accessed on Feb 17, 2007
  12. ↑ U.S. Department of State: Consular Information Sheet, Poland accessed on Feb 17, 2007
  13. ↑ Poles living in the East can apply for Polish Charter
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