European Citizenship by Descent

GWM Gems

• Citizenship by descent is based on jus sanguinis, the transmission of nationality through parentage, rather than birthplace.
• The modern jus soli / jus sanguinis distinction is largely a nineteenth-century legal construction, not a simple survival of ancient Roman law.
• Under EU law, Union citizenship follows Member State nationality: every person holding the nationality of an EU Member State is a citizen of the Union.
• The European Convention on Nationality recognises descent as a core acquisition route, requiring State Parties to provide nationality ex lege to children where one parent is a national, subject to limited exceptions for children born abroad.
• Malta’s citizenship by descent rules reflect a post-independence evolution from paternal transmission towards broader, gender-neutral and diaspora-sensitive recognition. Community Malta Agency guidance distinguishes the pre-1989 paternal model from the post-1989 rule recognising either Maltese parent.
• For HNW families, citizenship by descent is less about speed and more about legal proof, generational continuity, documentary reconstruction, and multi-jurisdictional planning.

Origins of citizenship by descent

Citizenship by descent, often abbreviated as CBD in global mobility discussions, is the modern expression of a much older legal instinct: that political membership may pass through the family line.

The Latin label is jus sanguinis, literally the “right of blood”. In contemporary nationality law, the phrase does not mean ethnicity in any biological or racial sense. It means legal parentage. A child may acquire a nationality because one or both parents held that nationality at the relevant time.

That distinction matters. Citizenship by descent is not merely sentimental recognition of heritage. It is a legal rule of attribution. It asks whether the state’s law recognises a line of transmission from an ancestor to the applicant, and whether that line remained legally alive through each generation.

“European citizenship by descent is best understood as continuity of legal belonging, not nostalgia. The decisive question is not whether a family feels European, but whether the law has preserved nationality through the relevant parent-child chain.”

Dr Jean-Philippe Chetcuti
Senior Partner – Citizenship, Residency & Private Client Tax, Chetcuti Cauchi Advocates

From allegiance to nationality

Modern nationality law did not emerge fully formed. Before the modern state, political membership was usually framed through allegiance, subjecthood, local status, religion, estate, domicile, or relationship to a sovereign. Birthplace and parentage mattered, but they were not always the neatly competing legal categories lawyers now call jus soli and jus sanguinis.

Recent legal history scholarship is useful here because it challenges a common oversimplification. The now-familiar binary between jus soli and jus sanguinis was not simply inherited intact from antiquity. A 2024 article in Law and History Review argues that the soli / sanguinis binary was a nineteenth-century invention, with parentage and birthplace transformed into competing positive-law principles during the early modern and post-revolutionary legal shifts.

That is important for GWM readers because it shows that citizenship by descent is both old and modern. The instinct to transmit belonging through family is ancient; the legal machinery through which modern states manage nationality by descent is comparatively recent.

This is why descent claims can appear deceptively simple. A family story may go back several generations, but the legal analysis depends on statutes, transitional rules, gender rules, marital-status rules, loss provisions, registration duties, and documentary proof at each point in time.

Europe’s nineteenth-century settlement

Continental Europe’s modern nationality systems were shaped heavily by codification. The French Civil Code, exported through Napoleonic influence, helped move many European systems towards descent-based nationality. The Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration summarises this shift by noting that the French Civil Code introduced into Europe by Napoleonic conquest replaced earlier jus soli traditions with jus sanguinis across many civil-law systems.

But Europe never became a pure jus sanguinis continent. France later reintroduced elements of jus soli to deal with immigration, labour needs, demographic pressures and integration. Germany, historically viewed as a strong jus sanguinis jurisdiction, introduced broader access for children of settled foreign parents from 2000. Ireland restricted its broad birthright citizenship model after a 2004 referendum. Italy remains largely descent-driven, while France, Spain and Belgium use variants of “double jus soli”.

The result is a European pattern rather than a single European rule: descent is foundational, but states combine it with birth, residence, registration, naturalisation and anti-statelessness safeguards in different ways.

For globally mobile families, that means “European citizenship by descent” is a useful search phrase, but not a single legal category. A German, Italian, Irish, Polish, Portuguese or Maltese descent claim may share a family-based logic, but each follows a different statutory route.

From nationality to Union citizenship

The creation of EU citizenship changed the significance of national citizenship without replacing national nationality law.

Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union provides that every person holding the nationality of a Member State is a citizen of the Union, and that Union citizenship is additional to, not a replacement for, national citizenship.

That rule is simple, but its effect is profound. A national descent rule adopted by one Member State may determine access not only to that state’s nationality but also to Union citizenship status and the rights attached to it.

EU law has therefore developed a careful balance. Member States remain competent to determine who their nationals are, but they must exercise that competence with due regard to EU law. In Micheletti, the Court of Justice stated that, under international law, each Member State lays down the conditions for acquisition and loss of nationality, while having due regard to Community law.

Later cases refined this balance. In Rottmann, the Court accepted that a Member State could withdraw nationality obtained by deception, provided the withdrawal complied with proportionality where it resulted in loss of Union citizenship. In Tjebbes, the Court examined automatic loss of nationality and Union citizenship through the lens of proportionality and fundamental rights.

The 2025 judgment in Commission v Malta went further in the specific context of investor citizenship, holding that Malta’s former institutionalised investor citizenship model amounted to the commercialisation of Union citizenship. That judgment is not a case about citizenship by descent, but it reinforces a wider direction of travel: EU citizenship remains anchored in Member State nationality, yet nationality rules with Union-wide effects are no longer seen as legally invisible at EU level.

Descent in European standards

The Council of Europe’s European Convention on Nationality provides one of the clearest modern statements of descent-based nationality. Article 6 requires each State Party to provide in its internal law for nationality to be acquired ex lege by children where one parent possesses that State’s nationality at the time of birth, subject to exceptions that may be provided for children born abroad.

This is the legal heart of citizenship by descent: parentage at birth, nationality of the parent at the relevant time, and transmission under the state’s internal law.

The same Convention also reflects the modern European concern with avoiding statelessness, discrimination and excessive uncertainty in nationality matters. The Council of Europe page identifies the European Convention on Nationality as ETS No. 166, opened in Strasbourg on 6 November 1997.

For practical planning, this means citizenship by descent should not be presented as an informal ancestral entitlement. It is a structured nationality mechanism recognised in European legal standards, but always filtered through domestic law.

Malta’s descent evolution

Malta’s citizenship by descent rules are especially interesting because they reflect the island’s post-independence history, its emigrant communities, and the gradual liberalisation of dual citizenship.

Community Malta Agency guidance explains that, between 21 September 1964 and 31 July 1989, Maltese citizenship by birth could arise for persons born abroad where, at the time of birth, their father was a citizen of Malta by birth, naturalisation or registration, subject to limits on onward transmission where citizenship had been acquired by registration on the basis of descent.

From 1 August 1989, the rule became broader and gender-neutral: persons born abroad could become Maltese citizens by birth where, at the time of birth, either the father or mother was a citizen of Malta by birth, naturalisation or registration, again subject to the noted limits on transmission from citizenship acquired by registration on the basis of descent.

The dual citizenship story is equally important. Community Malta Agency notes that dual or multiple citizenship became the rule rather than the exception after important changes in 2000, and that from 10 February 2000 a Maltese citizen could acquire and retain foreign citizenship together with Maltese citizenship. Section 7 of the Maltese Citizenship Act is quoted in the same guidance as providing that “it shall be lawful for any person to be a citizen of Malta, and at the same time a citizen of another country.”

“Maltese citizenship by descent is often a documentary exercise before it is a legal argument. The family line must be reconstructed through civil-status records, dates, gender rules, marriage status, loss rules and amendments that changed the effect of Maltese nationality across generations.”

Dr Antoine Saliba Haig
Partner, Immigration & Global Mobility, Chetcuti Cauchi Advocates

Why families revisit descent

Citizenship by descent has become more prominent because families are more globally dispersed, records are more searchable, and dual citizenship is more accepted than it was for much of the twentieth century.

For HNW and globally mobile families, descent-based citizenship may be relevant to relocation planning, education access, family continuity, estate planning, business mobility and personal identity. But it should not be oversold. A citizenship-by-descent claim is not a discretionary residence application and not a wealth product. It is a legal status claim based on ancestry, nationality transmission and proof.

The practical issues usually include:

The legal difficulty is often not proving descent in a genealogical sense. It is proving that nationality passed legally and was not interrupted.

A modern planning lens

European citizenship by descent sits at the intersection of family history and state law. It is therefore attractive, but also unforgiving.

Families should avoid three assumptions.

First, ancestry is not the same as citizenship. Many applicants can show an ancestor born in a European country, but cannot show uninterrupted legal transmission of nationality.

Second, citizenship by descent is not uniform across Europe. Some countries allow multiple generations to claim; others impose limits, require registration, or distinguish between automatic citizenship and citizenship available by application.

Third, citizenship is not the same as tax residence. Acquiring or confirming a nationality does not automatically make a person tax resident in that country. Separate tax and residence analysis is usually needed, particularly where family members may relocate, acquire property, study, work, inherit assets, or restructure wealth across borders.

This is where global mobility planning becomes more sophisticated. The legal question is not only “Can the applicant obtain citizenship?” It is also “What legal, tax, residence, succession and reporting consequences follow if the family confirms or acquires that status?”

European citizenship by descent FAQs