10 J. Shaw operation of law, of their Dutch citizenship on the grounds of habitual residence outside the EU for more than 10 years, where they have another nationality (whether acquired afterwards or before).16 It will be interesting to see whether the CJEU recognises habitual residence abroad as a legitimate state interest justifying withdrawal of citizenship and thus loss of EU citizenship, especially since such a withdrawal of citizenship by operation of law by definition deprives individuals, including children, of the possibility of individual (judicial) review of their cases. This case is especially interesting because after Brexit the UK is set to become be a third country vis-à-vis the EU. Thus EU citizenship will presumably not offer the counterbalance to the lack of recognition of dual nationality under Netherlands law, which currently reduces the options available to migrant Dutch citizens. This case should be seen, however, alongside interesting political developments. After the Brexit vote, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands appeared to double down on his country’s resistance to dual citizenship, despite pressure from Dutch citizens resident in the UK.17 However, perhaps as a harbinger of further changes to come in other member states in order to be responsive to the citizenship consequences of Brexit, the new coalition agreement reached in October 2017 as the basis for the creation of the new government adopted a more liberal approach to dual citizenship. This had been the existing party policy of just one of the four coalition partners (the D66 Liberal Democrats party). It offers the prospect of legal reform in order to provide assurances to Dutch citizens resident in the UK that they will be able to keep their Netherlands citizenship after naturalising in the UK.18 16 17 18 Case C-221/17. For a brief commentary see de Haart, B. and Mantu, S. (2017), ‘Loss of Dutch nationality ex lege: EU law, gender and multiple nationality’, GlobalCIT blog, http://globalcit.eu/ loss-of-dutch-nationality-ex-lege-eu-law-gender-and-multiple-nationality/. ‘Dutch nationals taking UK citizenship “will lose Netherlands passports”’, The Guardian, 17 July 2017, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/17/dutch-nationals-brexit-uk-citizenship-lose-netherlands-passports-mark-rutte; for details on loss of citizenship by acquisition of foreign citizenship, see GlobalCIT Citizenship Modes of Loss database, http:// globalcit.eu/loss-of-citizenship/. See ‘Brexit: Dutch nationals living in Britain will be allowed dual citizenship’, The Guardian, 10 October 2017, available at https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/oct/10/dutch-nationals-living-britain-allowed-dual-citizenshipbrexit. The details of how this might work are not as yet known. Details of the earlier D66 proposal, which cited research showing that the Netherlands is now an outlier in the matter of dual citizenship in Europe can be found here: http://fasos.maastrichtuniversity.nl/weekly/ macimide-dataset-cited-in-proposed-amendment-of-dutch-citizenship-law/.