Citizenship

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination found that children of mixed marriages involving Turkish Cypriots reportedly face significant difficulties getting Cypriot nationality, and it called on Cyprus to make access to nationality non-discriminatory in practice. Article 109 of Law 141(I)/2002 lets the Council of Ministers withhold citizenship by descent where a parent's entry into or stay in Cyprus was illegal. Because the Republic treats the whole island as its territory but does not treat entry through ports and airports in the north as lawful entry, that proviso has a concentrated effect on mixed families living there. The criteria for an exceptional grant anyway are those in Council of Ministers Decision 65.067 of 14 February 2007 — born on or before 20 July 1974; a foreign parent who is not a Turkish national; a marriage abroad, or in Cyprus before 20 July 1974; a relationship unrelated to the events of 1974; or residence in Pyla — quoted verbatim in the Administrative Court's 2017 Aydin judgment and applied in later cases including Eda Hancer v. the Minister of Interior. On 9 April 2025 the Supreme Constitutional Court dismissed Hancer's appeal; it held that the proviso and the 2007 criteria did not amount to arbitrary discrimination, while upholding the refusals. After the Presidency's 26 January 2024 measures, which included examining pending applications within the 2007 framework, only 14 applications had been approved by May 2024, against thousands of reported applications. K.E. v. Cyprus (no. 20913/24), a child's registration case, ended in a friendly settlement on 6 November 2025; a settlement is not a finding on the merits.^{123456789101112}