The long version runs to about 1,550 words and is worth the time. This is the same story in a fifth of the space.
1956
Antonius Zuidwijk, a young deck officer in the Dutch merchant navy, docks in Argentina. The Dutch community there offers him a better job than the one he has. He takes it, and for the first time he can send money home to his mother in the Netherlands. He is one of roughly half a million Dutch citizens who left between 1946 and 1969 — about four per cent of the country — pushed out by a weak economy, no work and no housing as much as drawn away by adventure.
1964
His son is born in Argentina. They give him a beautiful Argentine name, Guillermo, and a Dutch upbringing: the language, the clubs, the school, the family stories, the trips. The family never quite sees itself as Argentine or as Dutch. It has two cultures and, as they put it, both a motherland and a fatherland.
1978
Matilde dies. Guillermo’s grandmother crosses the Atlantic and brings him, fifteen years old, to the Netherlands. He is given his first Dutch passport of his own and is proud of it. Later he goes back to Argentina to persuade his father to come with him. “Maybe later,” his father says.
1985
The Dutch nationality law changes. Nobody at the embassy tells Antonius or Guillermo that anything has changed for them, although they visit. Guillermo is treated as Dutch and believes he is.
1995
Guillermo turns 31 and loses his Dutch nationality to the second version of the ten-year clock, which at that time turned on where you lived rather than on your passport. He is not told. He does not know.
2003
The law changes again. The family hear about it from relatives in the Netherlands — again, not from the embassy. Guillermo asks whether he can have his nationality back, is handed a form, fills it in, and sensibly puts all his children on it. In June 2003 he is Dutch again and holds a new passport. His children get theirs. His father is proud.
What nobody mentions, through all the calls and the visits, is that a third version of the clock has just started running from the date of that passport, on different terms from the law that had just ended.
2013
Ten years after the passport was issued, Guillermo loses his Dutch nationality for the second time. Again without warning. He had not renewed it — the economy was poor, he was not travelling, and for almost any other country in the world that would not have mattered.
2016
Things improve and the family plan a visit. At the embassy only two of the six children’s applications are taken in. Guillermo’s and his youngest daughter’s are refused at the counter. A telephone call follows in which he is reprimanded, told he should have applied earlier, told there is now no route back, and warned that visas may be difficult because he could be suspected of wanting to stay. Nothing is ever put in writing — not even on the two applications that were accepted and paid for.
Nobody mentions that he could recover his nationality by living in the Netherlands for a year. With school-age children, work and a divorce behind him he probably could not have. But he was not told.
Where it stands
Guillermo has accepted that it is too late for him. Three of the six children are still Dutch, because they were already adults in 2013. The government says the three younger ones lost their nationality/citizenship along with their father.
We say they did not, and that the law is on their side. Another paragraph of the nationality law protects a minor who “was born in the country of the nationality he got”. These children were born in Argentina and were given Argentine nationality at birth, without being asked, and they are not permitted to give it up. The government reads “got” as meaning only a nationality a person chose to take. We read it as it is written, and so do a number of other lawyers.
The case rests on that one word. Grandpa Antonius put it more plainly: “I used to get a slap on my head. I wouldn’t have asked for that voluntarily, would I?”