Since 1962, Polish law, including the Constitution, has not allowed 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. 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 antisemitic campaign that forced out of Poland from 15,000 to 20,000 Polish Jews, who were stripped of their Polish citizenship. 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, Sweden, and elsewhere. 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 when applying for the confirmation of their Polish citizenship, these Jews and their offspring 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 8 March 1968, will be given back their Polish citizenship.
Loss criteria The issue of losing one's citizenship before 1962 is complex, and the different principles of the law governing it are the following: • A person born before the 1951 law entered into force may inherit only the Polish citizenship of their father if their parents were married, or their mother-otherwise. • A person who joined a foreign army (even if never served but conscripted on paper), worked in a public job in a foreign country (very wide and volatile definition for that but this includes: teacher, religious leader, postman and even in a territory not defined as a country like British Palestine) or received any foreign citizenship prior to the entry into force of the law of 1951 – loses their citizenship immediately, and if a married man, also his wife and minor children (younger than 18) lose their citizenship. •
Nevertheless, if they were
not exempt from Polish army duty then only getting
foreign citizenship will
not revoke their Polish one. Public work and army register will always cause the loss of citizenship. Therefore, an adult unmarried woman has lost her citizenship on obtaining foreign citizenship before 1951, because they had no military duty in Poland. Married women stayed under the "protection" of their husband's citizenship and kept it as long as the husband didn't lose it. • On the other hand, in the case of men there are two conditions which need to prevail: men who both got foreign citizenship and passed the age of Polish military duty (50 since the law changed on 29 May 1950) had lost their citizenship. • A person who obtained a foreign citizenship (non Polish) due to the changes of the borders after World War II, or had Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian citizenship in 1951 had lost their 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 were signed between the USSR and Poland (e.g., in 1945 and 1956), then they regained their Polish citizenship. In fact, every Pole that became a Soviet citizen and did not take advantage of the opportunity to come back to Poland due to these agreements, lost their Polish citizenship. • 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 entered into force. Otherwise it will be difficult to prove their Polish citizenship. If the parents stayed in Poland after 1920 it might help. • The law from 1920 allows for citizenship to pass from father to his born-out-of-wedlock child only if the father declared his paternity before the child turned 18 and only in front of Polish authorities. Hence, without an original birth certificate with the father's name it might be difficult to prove. • The law from 1962 allows for citizenship to pass from father to his born-out-of-wedlock child only if the father declared his paternity within one year from birth. Hence, such children of only a Polish father (mother is not Polish) born when this law was in force must show an original birth certificate or a paternity declaration signed before they turned one year old (in Israel, this declaration is usually done in the hospital, when registering as the newborn's father and it is saved in the archives of the Ministry of Interior and a copy of it can be issued on request). • 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 70s Poland signed with some countries of Central and Eastern Europe the conventions on avoidance of multiple nationality from which it withdrew in the 90s and 2000s. ==Dual citizenship==