We do not help people move to South Africa. What we do is help people who are in South Africa with anything that turns on Dutch law — nationality/citizenship first of all, and the immigration questions that come with it, including coming back to the Netherlands.

Why South Africa and the Netherlands keep meeting

Dutch families have been settling in South Africa for a very long time, and the traffic has never run one way. Today we act for Dutch nationals living in South Africa, for South Africans with Dutch ancestry, and for a good number of people who turn out to be Dutch without ever having realised it — sometimes a couple of generations after anyone in the family last thought about it.

Nationality

The questions that reach us from South Africa are nearly always the same three. Is the Dutch nationality still there? Can it be proved? Can it be recovered? On the South African side there is the Citizenship Act and the question of automatic loss, on which the Supreme Court of Appeal has had something to say — and that matters, because each country decides for itself what it will permit.

• South Africa — Citizenship Act
• South Africa — return or repair of citizenship
• The 5-, 10- and 13-year clocks, and loss of Dutch nationality
• Are you Dutch? Prove it!

Coming back to the Netherlands

If you are Dutch, or can be Dutch again, the route back is a nationality question before it is an immigration one, and that is usually the cheaper door. If you are not, it is an immigration question — and where an EU national appears anywhere in the family, the European route is often the gentler one. Dutch immigration and residence.

Where to start

Send us where you were born, where you live now, which nationalities are held by whom in the family and roughly when each was acquired, and photographs of any Dutch document anyone still has, however old and in whatever condition. That is usually enough for us to say where you stand. Contact us.