Calls to revoke former minister Karin Kneissl’s citizenship after she made more damning comments against her home country have raised fresh questions about Austrian law.
Calls to strip Austrian citizenship from former foreign minister Karin Kneissl have revived a question many foreigners ask sooner or later: can Austria actually take citizenship away?
This week, the liberal Neos party said it wanted an “Aberkennungsverfahren” (revocation procedure) launched against Kneissl, who has been living in Russia and working there, according to Kurier. The demand was linked to her public attacks on Austria, including remarks made in interviews on YouTube.
Kneissl led Austria’s foreign ministry until June 2019 under the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition. She later moved to Russia, and worked there for the geopolitics think tank G.O.R.K.I. at the State University of St Petersburg.
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In recent interviews, she made a series of harsh comments about Austria.
“If I miss anything about Europe, it’s France, not Austria. In France, people were human, in Austria they were hyenas,” she said most recently.
In 2024, she argued it was no coincidence Adolf Hitler was Austrian, blaming what she called “this mixture of small-mindedness, envy, and enormous inferiority complexes”. It’s often and strong enough that some politicians in Austria are calling for the government to strip her of her Austrian citizenship.
So what does Austrian law allow, and how high are the hurdles in practice?
What does Austrian law say about revoking citizenship?
Austria’s Citizenship Act (Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz) provided only narrow routes to losing citizenship, lawyers said.
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Lawyer Georg Klammer told Kurier that the case would be “completely new territory”. He pointed to the rule that a withdrawal could come into consideration only if someone voluntarily entered the service of a foreign state and, through that behaviour, significantly harmed Austria’s interests or reputation.
The law also allowed citizenship to be withdrawn if someone voluntarily entered the military service of a foreign state, and this was applied only in rare exceptional cases.
The key point here was that these are specific, exceptional scenarios.
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What role does EU citizenship play?
Losing Austrian citizenship would not just affect the person’s status in Austria.
Klammer told Kurier that the European Court of Justice required a strict proportionality review, because losing Austrian citizenship automatically also meant losing EU citizenship, which set a high bar.
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The lawyer gave a practical example: without Austrian citizenship, Kneissl could not simply settle in France, because she would lose the rights that come with EU citizenship.
Can Austria make someone stateless?
There is also another major restriction: Austria was committed to an international convention aimed at reducing statelessness. Under that framework, citizenship should not be withdrawn if it would leave the person stateless.
This matters because of a different pathway that was more straightforward legally: if someone acquired another citizenship without permission, they could automatically lose Austrian citizenship.
In Kneissl’s case, she had said she was not ready to take Russian citizenship and still had Austrian citizenship.
READ ALSO: EXPLAINED: When can Austrian citizenship be revoked?
Is it possible to lose Austrian citizenship for insulting Austria?
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Based on what legal experts told Austrian media, criticism and insults alone were not the point.
Neos MP Dominik Oberhofer told Der Standard that the remarks were “dumb, but legitimate, because freedom of expression exists”. His argument instead focused on whether Kneissl was working “in the service of Russia” in a way that aimed to harm Austria.
In other words, the political debate centred less on offensive statements, and more on whether someone’s conduct could meet the legal threshold for revocation.
Lawyer Balazs Esztegar told Profil that a revocation procedure would have to be “very well justified” and that the relevant paragraph was more aimed at espionage activity, which would likely be difficult to prove in Kneissl’s case.
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Key vocabulary
die Staatsbürgerschaft – citizenship
das Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz – Austria’s Citizenship Act
die Aberkennung – revocation (withdrawal)
die Sachverhaltsdarstellung – written submission setting out alleged facts
die Unionsbürgerschaft – EU citizenship
die Verhältnismäßigkeitsprüfung – proportionality assessment (legal balancing test)
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