Report on Citizenship Law: Germany ended by renunciation of a previous nationality. This cannot properly be taken into account in the statistics. Despite such inaccuracies, dual nationality has in fact become quite customary in German naturalisation law primarily for nationals refusing to release their nationals from their nationality or making release dependent upon unreasonably difficult conditions. There may however also occur inaccuracies on the other side of the dual nationality coin: For a short period, the statistics on acquisition of German nationality by renouncing a previous nationality may have led to an incorrect impression of the actual number of dual nationals. This has been particularly so in the case of Turkish citizens where the German nationality was regularly acquired under a criticised procedure of renouncing the former Turkish nationality and with an almost simultaneous reacquisition of Turkish nationality once the applicants had been naturalised as German citizens. This somewhat strange legal situation was made possible by the provision according to the nationality law valid until the end of 1999 whereby the German nationality was not lost as a result of the voluntary acquisition of a foreign nationality if the German national’s permanent residence remained in Germany. Turkish nationals with the silent agreement of the Turkish authorities did in practice almost immediately after formal renunciation of their Turkish nationality reacquire the Turkish nationality once they had received the German nationality. Abuse of this loophole in the law was stopped by the nationality law reform of 1999/ 2000 providing for a loss of German nationality upon voluntary acquisition of a foreign nationality even in the case of applicants maintaining their permanent residence in Germany. Unfortunately, the legal change was not noticed by many Turkish citizens and obviously not even by the Turkish authorities. Therefore, it is estimated that 40,000 Turks, almost unnoticed, lost their German nationality after the entry into force of the new nationality law and upon the reacquisition of their Turkish nationality. Section 38 of the Residence Act, however, has provided for a settlement permit for persons who have lost their German nationality in this way by taking into account that German nationals might also lose German nationality under the ‘option model’. This provision has been used to also grant a secure residence permit to Turkish citizens who have involuntarily lost their German nationality, since they were assuming that they could reacquire their Turkish nationality. This anecdote of the never-ending struggle about dual nationality in Germany should, however, not be over-estimated and certainly remained of minor statistical importance. Moreover, the effects of these withdrawals no longer influence the current statistical data. The statistics show a substantial difference in acceptance of dual nationality. Nationals of the Iranian Republic, Serbia and Montenegro (former Yugoslavia), Afghanistan, Morocco, Ukraine, Israel, the Russian Federation, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Syria are generally naturalised (between 80 and 100 per cent) without having to renounce their previous nationality. The naturalisation of Union citizens, however, has initially been rather insignificant in spite of the privileged possibility to maintain their previous nationality on the basis of reciprocity. In 2003, of 1,849,986 EU citizens living in Germany, only 4,025 were naturalised as German citizens, of which 3,203 kept their previous citizenship. This represented merely 1.83 per cent of the total number of naturalisations in Germany in 2003 (Statistische Bundesamt, 20 September 2004). The quota of dual nationals was, at almost 80 per cent, considerably above the average quota of 40.2 per cent of all naturalisations at the time. In 2010, 14,687 Union citizens naturalised in Germany. Meanwhile, the naturalisation of EU citizens significantly increased to roughly 21 per cent of all naturalisations in 2013, that is, a total of 23,635. New developments with regard to the number of naturalisations in Germany in general show a continuous decline until 2010. 124,566 applicants were naturalised in 2008, which 26 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/5- © 2020 Author(s)