Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andre Geim has lost his Dutch citizenship after accepting a British knighthood, leaving him “extremely annoyed” at the Netherlands’ strict dual citizenship policies.
For years, Geim was known to the world as a Nobel Prize-winning Dutch physicist, which suited both him and the Dutch just fine. He is still a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but now, according to the government of the Netherlands, he is no longer Dutch.
Thirteen years ago, Mr. Geim took British citizenship to accept a knighthood, and until recently he had no inkling that it would cause a problem. He said he was informed that he was no longer a Dutch citizen and must hand his passport over at the embassy in London or face consequences from Interpol, because the Netherlands sharply restricts dual citizenship.
The Netherlands permits dual nationality only in exceptional cases like marriage or asylum.
“Personally, I consider myself a Dutch-British Nobel Prize winner (in this order),” he said in an email. “The history and my time living and working in the Netherlands are very close to my heart.”
The decision to revoke his citizenship, he added, “is just so sad and odd.”
Mr. Geim was born in 1958 in Russia to parents of German descent. He adopted Dutch citizenship in the 1990s while at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, working on what would prove to be groundbreaking physics.
Geim has hired an Amsterdam law firm to help him and the legal team has appealed to the IND, citing “exceptional circumstances.” They argue that keeping the Nobel laureate as a Dutch citizen would serve “the interest of the Dutch state.”
Technically, Dutch citizenship law automatically revokes nationality once you’ve acquired another — yet somehow this Nobel laureate slipped through the cracks for over a decade.