Denmark’s Ministry of Immigration and Integration will let certain citizenship cases be reopened, following two Supreme Court rulings handed down in the autumn of 2025.
People who have been told that they are not, and never were, Danish citizens can now request a new review of their case. DR reports that the ministry announced the change of course on Friday, September 11. The report was distributed by the news agency Ritzau.
In its press release, the ministry states that the rulings mean its existing practice cannot be maintained unconditionally. According to DR, the option applies to people who previously received a ministry decision denying that they ever held Danish citizenship.
The condition for a new assessment is that the person had a legitimate expectation of being Danish. Per the press release, the ministry will assess whether the person had reasonable grounds to believe they were a Danish citizen.
The shift comes after almost a year of deliberation inside the ministry. The two rulings were delivered on September 3 and October 3, 2025. Until now, officials have looked only at the formal conditions in the Danish Nationality Act.
The two Supreme Court cases
One case concerned a woman who believed for 49 years that she was a Danish citizen. She was born in Aalborg in 1969 to an Australian mother and a Danish father. Danish authorities later concluded that an error had been made and that she was not Danish.
The woman has lived in the United Kingdom and works as a nurse, DR reports. In the second case, the authorities decided that a man of Egyptian background and his son were not Danish citizens either. Both had believed that they were.
Neither party won their case at the Supreme Court. The judges did, however, send a signal about how the law should be interpreted, according to the DR report. A decisive element concerns the person’s expectations and how they have arranged their life.
The ministry states that considerations of expectation can mean a person holds Danish citizenship, even where the conditions in the Nationality Act for acquiring it were not met. That factor has not previously been part of the ministry’s assessment.
Requests for reopening are submitted to the Ministry of Immigration and Integration, which will then carry out the assessment described in the press release. The ministry has not published an estimate of how many cases may be affected.
The rulings and the new practice concern people who already believed they were citizens, not applicants going through the ordinary naturalization process. Rules on Danish citizenship are set out in the Nationality Act.
