South Africa's 2025 Dual-Citizenship Ruling: Keeping Your SA Passport When You Naturalise in the EU

A South African founder who moves to Europe on a founder or residence visa, builds a life there, and eventually qualifies for citizenship used to face a quiet, expensive trap at the finish line: the day they naturalised, South Africa took their passport away. That trap is gone. On 6 May 2025 the Constitutional Court struck down section 6(1)(a) of the South African Citizenship Act 88 of 1995, the provision that caused automatic loss of citizenship for anyone who voluntarily acquired another nationality without first getting the Minister's permission to retain. The declaration is retroactive all the way to the section's promulgation on 6 October 1995. For a founder planning a five-to-ten-year route to an EU passport, this removes the single biggest reason to hesitate. But it also shifts the real question: keeping both passports is now decided by the EU country you naturalise in, not by South Africa.

Most guides you will find on this cover the ruling backward-looking, aimed at emigrants who already lost their citizenship and want it restored. This one is forward-looking, for a founder who has not left yet and is choosing a route.

What section 6(1)(a) actually did, and why it hit founders hardest

The old rule was blunt. Under section 6(1)(a), a South African citizen who acquired the citizenship of another country by a voluntary and formal act, naturalisation being the obvious one, ceased to be a South African citizen automatically, by operation of law. There was no letter, no notice, no ceremony. You simply were not South African anymore the moment the other country's passport was issued.

There was one escape hatch: section 6(2). Before you acquired the foreign citizenship, you could apply to the Department of Home Affairs to retain your South African citizenship. Approved in time, the retention letter (the DHA-1664 form) preserved your status. Miss it, apply late, or naturalise first and ask questions later, and the loss had already happened.

For a founder this was the worst possible design, because the loss landed at the end of a long, deliberate process. You spend years on a founder visa, renew it, hit the residence threshold, sit the language and civic requirements, and finally take the naturalisation oath. That oath is exactly the "voluntary and formal act" section 6(1)(a) punished. The people most exposed were not casual emigrants; they were the ones who did everything right and went all the way to a second citizenship.

What the Constitutional Court changed on 6 May 2025

In Democratic Alliance v Minister of Home Affairs and Another (CCT 184/23) [2025] ZACC 8, the Constitutional Court confirmed an order of constitutional invalidity that the Supreme Court of Appeal had already granted. It declared section 6(1)(a) inconsistent with the Constitution and invalid. The Court found the automatic, no-reasons stripping of citizenship arbitrary and irrational, and an unjustifiable limitation of the right to citizenship.

Two features of the judgment matter for planning:

1. It is retroactive to 6 October 1995. The section is treated as invalid from the day it was promulgated, not just from 2025. Everyone who lost citizenship under it is deemed never to have lost it.
2. The retention step falls away. The order struck section 6(1)(a) and did not expressly deal with section 6(2), so this is a reading rather than a line of the judgment, but it is the reading practitioners have consistently landed on: with no automatic loss rule left to escape, there is nothing for a retention application to protect you from. The section 6(2) workaround was a fix for a problem that no longer exists.

The practical translation for a founder: naturalising in Portugal, Spain or France in 2027 or 2031 will not, by itself, cost you your South African citizenship on the South African side. You do not lose it, and you do not have to ask permission to keep it.

The administrative reality in 2026: the law settled, and Home Affairs has caught up

For most of the first year after the judgment the honest answer was that the law had moved faster than the paperwork. That gap has now closed, and it closed faster than almost anyone expected.

The Department of Home Affairs launched a dedicated Citizenship Reinstatement Portal at myhomeaffairsonline.dha.gov.za on 24 November 2025, and rolled out its final phase, version 2.0, on 10 February 2026. The portal now handles qualifying applications with real-time automated processing, and Home Affairs puts the turnaround at as little as one hour for applicants whose records check out. Phase one alone processed 12,008 citizenship status checks and 1,088 reinstatements in its first eleven weeks, which gives you a sense of how many people the old rule quietly caught.

For a founder planning forward rather than repairing the past, that matters in two ways. It shows the ruling is being administered rather than merely declared. And it means a working recovery route exists if your status is ever questioned at a mission or a border post. The sensible posture is:

• Treat your South African citizenship as intact through and after EU naturalisation, because in law it is.
• Keep your own clean paper trail anyway: your South African passport, ID, birth certificate and proof of your naturalisation abroad. Older supporting documents are worth holding on to, because any status check goes faster when you can produce the underlying records yourself.
• Do not treat a retention letter as a requirement. It is no longer the gate. If a specific consulate still references it, that is administrative habit, not the law.

None of this is legal or citizenship advice, and administrative practice keeps evolving; confirm your personal position with a South African immigration lawyer before you act on a naturalisation timeline. What we can say with confidence is the direction: the founder who goes all the way to an EU passport no longer forfeits the South African one to do it.

The part that still decides everything: the EU country's own dual-nationality rule

Here is the reframe that the restoration-firm coverage misses. Now that South Africa has stopped stripping citizenship, the country that decides whether you actually end up holding two passports is your destination, not South Africa. And the three founder routes Relovisa works with diverge sharply on this.

Portugal: keeps both, no renunciation. Portugal permits dual citizenship outright. Naturalising as Portuguese does not require you to give up your South African nationality, and Portugal will not ask you to. For a South African national the residence clock is ten years (Portugal's shorter seven-year track is reserved for nationals of EU member states and of Portuguese-speaking CPLP countries, and South Africa is neither), set by Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026, in force 19 May 2026. The time you spend on a Portugal D3 residence permit or a D2 counts toward that ten years, with one detail from the same 2026 reform that changes real timelines: on the post-reform rule as read by converging professional commentary, the count now runs from the effective issuance of the residence title, not from the date you applied or the date the visa was approved. Months spent waiting on an AIMA card no longer bank residence years. If your own timeline is tight, confirm that point against the official text of Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026 before you plan around it.

France: keeps both, fastest clock, but a new exam at the end. France has allowed multiple nationality since Loi 73-42 of 1973. Acquiring French citizenship does not require renouncing your South African one, and France's naturalisation-by-residence route is the fastest of the three at five years of legal residence (Code civil Article 21-17). The bar at the finish line went up on 1 January 2026: alongside B2 French, naturalisation now requires passing a civic exam of 40 questions on French history, institutions, culture and values, with a pass mark of 32 out of 40, introduced by the decrees of 15 July 2025 (Décrets no. 2025-647 and 2025-648). For a founder on a France Talent route this is still the shortest path to an EU passport while keeping the South African one, just with a real test to sit at the end of it.

Spain: formally asks you to renounce, and South Africa is not exempt. This is the catch. Spain's naturalisation-by-residence route ordinarily requires a declaration renouncing your prior nationality at the oath ceremony, under Article 23 of the Spanish Civil Code. Article 23 does not carry the exempt-country list itself; it points across to Article 24.1, which is where the countries sit: the Ibero-American states, Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and Portugal, joined by France under the 2022 bilateral convention. (Article 23 separately spares Sephardim of Spanish origin.) South Africa is on neither list. Spain's standard residence requirement for a South African is also ten years. So a founder aiming at a Spanish passport should go in knowing the renunciation declaration is part of the process.

There is a genuine subtlety worth flagging, and then handing to a lawyer: the renunciation Spain requires is a declaration made before Spanish authorities, and its effect on your South African status depends on South African law. Since South Africa no longer treats acquiring another citizenship as automatic loss, the two systems can now point in different directions. That interaction is exactly the kind of thing to confirm with a Spanish nationality lawyer and a South African one before you rely on it, not something to assume from a blog.

For the full residence-to-citizenship comparison across the founder routes, see our EU citizenship timeline for founders and the route-by-route breakdown in Portugal citizenship: the ten-year clock explained.

If keeping your South African passport is a priority, the ruling has quietly made Portugal and France the cleaner endgames, and Spain the one that needs a conversation before you commit. That is a planning input you can act on today, at the visa-choice stage, years before naturalisation is even on the table.

Where this sits in the wider South African founder move

Citizenship is the finish line, but it is not the first decision. The ruling changes the endgame; it does not change the two things that trip South African founders up at the start of the journey:

• Getting the money out. Moving your proof of funds and working capital out of South Africa runs through exchange control (the Single Discretionary Allowance, the Foreign Investment Allowance, and the AIT approval once you cease tax residency) and, if you cease residency, the section 9H exit-tax event. Those are separate machines from the visa itself, and they are where sequencing matters most. We cover the exit-tax and exchange-control playbook, and the specific mechanics of transferring the Spain Startup proof-of-funds out of South Africa, in companion pieces (published separately in this South Africa cluster).
• Choosing the route that fits your company and your capital. A well-capitalised founder has different best options than a bootstrapped one. Our real all-in cost comparison of the EU founder routes and the France Talent versus Spain Startup head-to-head are the two most useful starting points, and opening an EU business bank account before residency is the operational step most people underestimate.

The through-line: the 2025 dual-citizenship ruling took the scariest downside off the table. What is left is a sequencing problem, choose the route, move the money cleanly, count the residence years, and, if you want it, take the EU passport at the end without giving up the South African one (in Portugal and France cleanly, in Spain with advice).