Czech Republic

Czech citizenship by descent rests on Act No. 186/2013 Coll., on Citizenship of the Czech Republic, in force since 1 January 2014 and amended most recently by Act No. 152/2025 Coll. (effective 1 October 2025; the descent and declaration provisions are unchanged since 2019). Three routes matter for people with Czech ancestry. First, confirmation of existing citizenship: under §4, a child acquires citizenship at birth if at least one parent is a Czech citizen on the day of birth, regardless of birthplace. Anyone who descends from an unbroken chain of citizens is already a citizen and applies only for a certificate of citizenship (osvědčení, §§42–49), which formally confirms the status.

Second, acquisition by declaration under §31, the central route for the diaspora. §31(1) lets a person who lost Czech or Czechoslovak citizenship before 1 January 2014 re-acquire it, unless the loss occurred under Constitutional Decree No. 33/1945 Coll. (persons of German or Hungarian nationality) or under the 1945 treaty with the USSR on Transcarpathian Ukraine (published as No. 186/1946 Coll.), and unless the person became, or would have become, a citizen of the Slovak Socialist Republic on 1 January 1969, or acquired Slovak Socialist Republic or Slovak citizenship after that date and is still a Slovak citizen. §31(2) covers former Czechoslovak citizens who had permanent residence in the Czech Republic or the Czech Socialist Republic before leaving for abroad, provided they are not Slovak citizens on the day of the declaration. §31(3), inserted by Act No. 207/2019 Coll. with effect from 6 September 2019, extends the declaration to any person with at least one parent or grandparent who is or was a former citizen within the meaning of §31(1), again provided the declarant is not a Slovak citizen on the day of the declaration. A declaration is an entitlement, not a discretionary grant: if the statutory conditions are met, citizenship must be conferred. There is no residence, language or income requirement and no filing deadline.

Third, naturalisation (§§11–27) remains the fallback for descendants outside the declaration categories, typically great-grandchildren. It requires a permanent residence permit in the Czech Republic; under §15(1) the required length of residence — but not the permit itself — can be waived for a person who is or was a citizen of the Czech Republic or the Czech Socialist Republic, for a person who held Czechoslovak citizenship up to 1968, and for an applicant at least one of whose parents is a Czech citizen. Naturalisation is discretionary and includes language and civics examinations (§14(4)–(5)), from which applicants under 15 or over 65 are exempt; §15(3) allows those conditions to be waived in cases deserving special consideration.

For the §31(3) declaration the anchor ancestor may be a parent or a grandparent who held Czech or Czechoslovak citizenship and lost it before 1 January 2014 other than under the excluded categories. Great-grandparents do not qualify as anchors: a great-grandchild of the emigrant generation cannot declare unless his/her own parent or grandparent independently held and lost citizenship. Consular guidance adds a further limit — the route is not treated as open where the parent or grandparent was born abroad between 1 October 1949 and 7 May 1969 and acquired Czech citizenship by the now-closed §33 declaration, since such a person never lost citizenship. No unbroken chain is required on this route; it is precisely designed for families in which citizenship was lost one or two generations back. Parents may make a separate declaration for a minor child under §31(3) by virtue of §31(5); a child older than 15 must consent under §31(7), with an officially verified signature unless the child signs before the receiving authority. Because a person who re-acquires citizenship by declaration becomes a citizen only from the day of acquisition, his/her children born earlier do not acquire anything automatically; they qualify in their own right only if one of their own parents or grandparents was a former citizen. Children born after a parent's re-acquisition are citizens by birth under §4.

Where the chain was never broken, generational depth is unlimited. A claimant whose ancestors retained Czechoslovak, and after 1 January 1993 Czech, citizenship at each successive birth is a citizen by operation of law and needs only the certificate of citizenship. Whether a person is or was a citizen is assessed under the law in force at the moment the acquisition or loss would have occurred, so each generation must be shown to have acquired citizenship at birth under the rules then applicable (see Historical Citizenship Rules) and no loss event — treaty naturalisation, release, deprivation, or, between 1993 and 2013, voluntary acquisition of a foreign citizenship — may have occurred before the next generation's birth. The regional authority examines this generation by generation, with archival searches where needed.

A narrow additional route, §32, concerns persons who on 31 December 1992 were citizens of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic without holding either Czech or Slovak republic-level citizenship; §32(2) extends this declaration to their descendants in the direct line without generational limit, provided the declarant has never been a Czech or Slovak citizen. The category is small but the unlimited direct line makes it worth checking in unusual family histories.

Czechoslovak citizenship came into existence on 28 October 1918. Under Constitutional Act No. 236/1920 Coll. and the post-war peace treaties, former Austro-Hungarian nationals became Czechoslovak citizens if they had acquired the right of domicile (domovské právo, Heimatrecht) in a municipality of the new state no later than 1 January 1910 and had held it continuously since; §9 of the same Act gave those who acquired the qualifying domicile only after that date a period in which to apply, and the peace treaties added option rights, so the 1910 test is a rule with exceptions rather than an absolute bar. That test governed state succession only. Ongoing acquisition and loss continued to be governed by the old Austrian rules (the 1811 Civil Code and the emigration legislation) and, in Slovakia, by the former Hungarian rules until Act No. 194/1949 Coll. repealed them on 30 September 1949. From 28 October 1918 until 30 September 1949, descent followed the father for children born in wedlock and the mother for children born out of wedlock. A foreign woman automatically acquired Czechoslovak citizenship by marrying a Czechoslovak citizen until Act No. 102/1947 Coll., effective 24 June 1947, made acquisition by marriage conditional on official consent. Emigrants who left the Czech lands before 28 October 1918 became Czechoslovak citizens as a rule only if they still satisfied the domicile rules and had not acquired another nationality; many pre-1918 emigrants therefore never held Czechoslovak citizenship at all, which defeats descent claims through them.

Act No. 194/1949 Coll., on Acquisition and Loss of Czechoslovak Citizenship, effective 1 October 1949, made descent formally gender-neutral but restricted transmission abroad: a child acquired citizenship at birth if both parents were Czechoslovak citizens, or if one parent was a citizen and the child was born on Czechoslovak territory; a child born abroad to one Czechoslovak parent and one foreign parent acquired citizenship only with the consent of the competent national committee — the regional national committee until 10 November 1958, the executive body of the district national committee thereafter — on the citizen parent's request, made within one year of the birth. Children born abroad between 1 October 1949 and 7 May 1969 to only one Czechoslovak parent therefore often acquired nothing. §33 of Act No. 186/2013 offered them a remedial declaration where that parent was, or would have been, a Czech republic-level citizen on 1 January 1969, but only until 1 January 2015; that window is closed.

With federalisation on 1 January 1969 (Constitutional Act No. 143/1968 Coll., Act No. 165/1968 Coll.), republic-level Czech and Slovak citizenships were created alongside federal citizenship; Act No. 39/1969 Coll. of the Czech National Council, effective 8 May 1969, assigned Czech citizenship as at 1 January 1969 by birthplace and supplementary criteria (§2) and restored full transmission abroad: under §8(4) a child with one Czech-citizen parent and one foreign parent acquired Czech citizenship at birth wherever born. Its transitional rules kept the older regime for children born abroad before 8 May 1969 to one citizen parent, which is what created the §33 cohort. On the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Act No. 40/1993 Coll. made everyone who held Czech republic-level citizenship on 31 December 1992 a citizen of the new Czech Republic on 1 January 1993, and continued descent through either parent. Whether an ancestor's citizenship attached to the Czech or the Slovak republic on 1 January 1969 is decisive for eligibility today: persons attributable to Slovakia, and their descendants, are directed to Slovak law, not §31.

Historical loss events are what usually interrupt a chain. Before 1949, citizenship was lost chiefly through naturalisation abroad under the continued Austrian rules, and a Czechoslovak woman generally lost citizenship on marriage to a foreigner when she thereby acquired his nationality. The Naturalisation Convention between Czechoslovakia and the United States of 16 July 1928 (No. 169/1929 Coll.), operative from 14 November 1929, caused loss of Czechoslovak citizenship on naturalisation in the United States — but only within the limits set by its own Article I. It reached a person over 21 naturalised on his/her own application while permanently resident there, and a person under 21 naturalised through a parent's naturalisation; and it expressly did not apply to a national who obtained naturalisation in the other country while his own country was at war. The Constitutional Court fixed that war period for Czechoslovakia as 17 September 1938 to 7 May 1957 (II. ÚS 307/97, 18 May 1999), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs states the same in its consular guidance. A United States naturalisation obtained in that nineteen-year window — which covers the 1938–39 refugee wave and the whole 1948 emigration cohort — therefore did not break the chain, and a naturalisation certificate from those years is not evidence of a loss. Outside that window the Convention applied until it was terminated with effect from 20 August 1997 (Communication No. 229/1997 Coll.). Article III added a converse rule: a person naturalised in one country who resumed residence in the other without intent to return lost the acquired nationality, intent being presumed after two years' residence.

Territorial and ethnic losses between 1938 and 1946 form a separate group. Under the Czecho-Slovak–German treaty on citizenship and option of 20 November 1938 (No. 300/1938 Coll.) and implementing Government Regulation No. 301/1938 Coll., inhabitants domiciled in the border districts ceded to Germany acquired German nationality with effect from 10 October 1938, with a right to opt for Czechoslovak citizenship until 29 March 1939. Constitutional Decree No. 33/1945 Coll. of 2 August 1945 then provided that Czechoslovak citizens of German or Hungarian nationality who had acquired German or Hungarian nationality under the occupying power's regulations lost Czechoslovak citizenship on the day of that acquisition (§1(1)), and that all remaining citizens of German or Hungarian nationality lost it on the decree's entry into force, 10 August 1945 (§1(2)). The Decree's carve-outs are decisive and often overlooked: it did not apply to Germans and Hungarians who had officially declared themselves Czechs or Slovaks (§1(3)) or to Czechs, Slovaks and other Slavs coerced into declaring German or Hungarian nationality (§1(4)), and under §2(1) citizenship was retained by those who proved they had stayed loyal to the Republic, never offended against the Czech and Slovak nations, and either took an active part in the liberation struggle or suffered under Nazi or fascist terror (application within six months, §2(2)); §3 allowed a further discretionary restitution application. Act No. 72/1958 Coll. later restored citizenship by operation of law to persons of Hungarian nationality resident in Czechoslovakia who had lost it under the Decree. Separately, the 1945 treaty on Transcarpathian Ukraine (No. 186/1946 Coll.) removed citizenship from most inhabitants of that ceded territory, with an option to retain it exercisable by persons of Czech and Slovak ethnicity. Losses under the Decree and under that treaty are the two categories expressly excluded from the §31 declaration — but the exclusion bites only where the ancestor actually fell within them, so a family covered by §1(3), §1(4) or §2(1) never suffered a Decree loss and is not excluded at all.

Under communist rule (Act No. 194/1949 Coll., then Act No. 39/1969 Coll.), citizenship was lost by release from the state bond on application (propuštění, in practice often demanded as a condition of legal emigration) and by deprivation (odnětí), used against citizens abroad who emigrated without permission, refused to return, engaged in disapproved activity, held a second nationality or, from 1958, stayed abroad more than five years without a valid document permitting residence abroad; judicial deprivation as a supplementary criminal penalty existed from 24 October 1948 to 31 December 1956. Loss by a woman's marriage to a foreigner persisted in limited form until Act No. 72/1958 Coll. abolished it with effect from 11 November 1958. Deprivation was abolished by Act No. 88/1990 Coll. with effect from 29 March 1990, and since 8 February 1991 the constitutional order has guaranteed that no one may be deprived of citizenship against his/her will. Importantly, outside the bilateral anti-dual-citizenship treaties (the 1928 US Convention and conventions with the USSR and several socialist states), voluntary naturalisation abroad did not by itself cause loss between 1 October 1949 and 31 December 1992; a second nationality was only a discretionary ground for deprivation, so many emigrants who were never released or deprived remained citizens, and their descendants may still be citizens today. Under Act No. 40/1993 Coll. §17, from 1 January 1993 to 31 December 2013 a Czech citizen automatically lost citizenship by voluntarily acquiring a foreign citizenship at his/her own request, with exceptions for acquisition by birth or in connection with marriage. Act No. 186/2013 abolished that ground: since 1 January 2014 citizenship is lost solely by the citizen's own declaration of renunciation under §40, available only to a person who lives permanently abroad, is not registered for permanent residence in the Czech Republic and holds, or is about to acquire, another citizenship. No loss occurs by mere acquisition of a foreign nationality, long residence abroad or non-use.

The §31 declaration is itself the reparation route for emigration-era losses, and it is far wider than its predecessors. Act No. 88/1990 Coll., in force from 29 March 1990, annulled deprivation decisions with retroactive effect for those who notified the authorities, and offered facilitated naturalisation, with effect only for the future, to persons released from the state bond between 1 October 1949 and 31 December 1989; both remedies had to be claimed by 31 December 1993, and neither reached the children of emigrants. Act No. 193/1999 Coll. then covered losses between 25 February 1948 and 28 March 1990 that occurred by release from the state bond or in connection with acquiring the citizenship of a state with which Czechoslovakia had an anti-dual-citizenship treaty, which is what finally captured 1928-Convention cases. Since 1 January 2014, §31(1) has had no loss-period window at all — any pre-2014 loss qualifies except the excluded categories — and since 6 September 2019 children and grandchildren are covered in their own right. Conversely, current law contains no restitution route for Decree No. 33/1945 deprivations or for Transcarpathian option losses, and those exclusions carry through to descendants under §31(3).

Family histories from the Nazi period need individual assessment rather than a general presumption. Refugees from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia who fled after March 1939 generally kept Czechoslovak citizenship at the time, and lost it later, if at all, through communist-era release or deprivation or through a post-1957 United States naturalisation — so their descendants usually come within the ordinary §31 rules. Families from the border districts ceded in October 1938 are in a different position: they generally became German nationals under Treaty No. 300/1938 Coll., a loss that Decree No. 33/1945 Coll. §1(1) confirms and that §31(1) excludes from the declaration. The Decree's §1(3), §1(4) and §2(1) exceptions cut the other way and matter most for exactly this group, since German-speaking Czechoslovaks who suffered under Nazi or fascist terror retained citizenship; whether an individual ancestor was excluded or retained therefore turns on the file, not on ethnicity or on where the family lived.

The remedial declaration under §33 for persons born abroad between 1 October 1949 and 7 May 1969 to one Czechoslovak parent expired on 1 January 2015. There is no registration deadline for children born abroad to Czech citizens: citizenship arises at birth by operation of law and can be documented at any time, though the birth must eventually be entered in the special registry (zvláštní matrika) in Brno before Czech documents issue. Czech law has no ethnic-origin citizenship route; compatriot programmes ease immigration, not citizenship. Slovak citizens are barred from the §31(2) and §31(3) declarations while they hold Slovak citizenship, and the exclusion of ancestors attributed to the Slovak republic on 1 January 1969 channels those families to Slovak law instead.

Since 1 January 2014 the Czech Republic accepts dual and multiple citizenship without restriction. No route relevant to descent requires renunciation of an existing nationality: declarants under §§31–32 keep their other citizenships, persons confirmed as citizens by descent keep theirs, and Act No. 186/2013 also dropped the renunciation requirement that Act No. 40/1993 Coll. had imposed on naturalisation. Acquiring a foreign citizenship no longer causes loss of Czech citizenship. The only residual limitation is eligibility-based, not renunciation-based: a person who is a Slovak citizen on the day of the declaration cannot use §31(2) or §31(3) at all, and §31(1) is closed to a person attributed to the Slovak republic on 1 January 1969 or still holding Slovak citizenship acquired after that date.

For periods before 2014 the older rules described above still determine whether an ancestor, or the applicant, had already lost citizenship: the 1928 United States Convention operated from 14 November 1929 to 20 August 1997 except for naturalisations obtained between 17 September 1938 and 7 May 1957, and voluntary acquisition of a foreign citizenship caused automatic loss between 1 January 1993 and 31 December 2013.

A §31 declarant submits, under §31(4): own birth certificate; marriage or partnership certificate, divorce decree or spouse's death certificate where applicable; parents' and, for §31(3), grandparents' birth, marriage, divorce or death certificates so far as they are needed to establish the line; and a document proving the date and manner of the loss of Czech or Czechoslovak citizenship by the declarant or by the parent or grandparent. Typical loss evidence is the ancestor's United States certificate of naturalization from a period in which the 1928 Convention operated (obtainable through NARA or USCIS genealogy records), a Czechoslovak release deed (propouštěcí listina), a deprivation decision, or a Czech-issued certificate documenting the loss. The missions also require a completed declaration that the applicant has not acquired Slovak citizenship, and an identity document; §32(4) makes proof of non-citizenship of Slovakia an express statutory requirement on that route. For a child's declaration the child's birth certificate and the notarised consent of the other parent are added.

An applicant for the certificate of citizenship files the statutory questionnaire (Annex 2 to Act No. 186/2013) together with the documents listed in §45(1): own birth and marriage certificates, the parents' birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates where the applicant holds them, previously issued documents on the citizenship of the applicant, the parents and any further ancestors, and evidence of any foreign naturalisation with its date. Older evidence such as Czechoslovak passports and identity cards is routinely asked for as well, under the authority's general power in §45(2) to call for further documents rather than as part of the statutory list. The regional authority obtains further records itself, including from regional and national archives, in complex cases.

Foreign public documents must in principle bear the higher authentication required for the issuing state — an apostille for Hague Convention countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia — and be accompanied by a certified translation into Czech, and the missions require originals rather than copies. There are three practical exceptions: documents issued in Slovak need no translation, foreign documents accompanied by an EU multilingual standard form under Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 need none either, and consular practice treats the United States certificate of naturalization as filed in the original with neither apostille nor translation. Under §66(2) and §67(3) the authority may also waive the higher authentication, or the document itself, where obtaining it would involve a hardly surmountable obstacle — relief that is regularly needed in old-emigration files. Czech-issued documents (rodný list, oddací list) need no authentication. Consulates verify copies and translations destined for the special registry for a per-page fee.

The competent authority for declarations and certificates alike is the regional office (krajský úřad) for the place of the person's permanent, or last permanent, residence in the Czech Republic; for people who never had residence there — the usual case for descendants abroad — it is the Municipal District Office of Prague 1 (§37(1), §44). A person abroad may make the declaration or file the certificate application at the Czech embassy or consulate for his/her district, which forwards the file to the competent authority within 30 days for declarations and without delay for certificates. Declarations must be made in person by prior appointment and cannot be mailed to the mission. Practice on certificate applications now varies: the Consulate General in Los Angeles has accepted postal filings since 9 September 2025 where the signatures are verified by a Czech honorary consul or a notary public, while Chicago requires personal attendance.

The sequence for a declaration: assemble the civil-status chain and loss evidence with apostilles and translations where required; make the declaration in writing and pay the fee — the missions issue and require their own prescribed forms, whereas a filing made inside the Czech Republic may be drafted in free form and submitted in person, by post, through a data box or with a recognised electronic signature; the regional office then verifies the conditions and, if they are met, issues the deed of acquisition (listina o nabytí státního občanství České republiky). Citizenship is acquired on the day the declarant takes over the deed (§37(3)). If the conditions are not met, the office issues a decision that citizenship was not acquired (§37(2)), appealable within 15 days to the superior authority — the Ministry of the Interior, or the Prague City Hall for decisions of a Prague municipal district office — and, unlike a discretionary naturalisation refusal on security grounds, fully reviewable by the administrative courts. There is no oath, interview, or language or civics test on the declaration and certificate routes; the citizenship oath (§27) belongs to naturalisation only. After acquisition, the new citizen has the foreign birth (and marriage) recorded in the special registry in Brno — the registry books the event within 30 days of receiving a complete file — and the Czech birth certificate then supports the first passport or identity card application. The deed of acquisition and the certificate of citizenship each serve as proof of citizenship for one year (§41); for the deed, the year runs from the day it is taken over, which is also the day citizenship is acquired.

Only one deadline here is statutory: §46 gives the regional office 180 days to issue a certificate of citizenship in complex cases requiring archival research, and requires it to issue one without delay otherwise. Act No. 186/2013 sets no time limit for deciding on a declaration; the general Administrative Procedure Code allows 30 days, extendable by a further 30 in complex cases, and the Ministry of the Interior says only that applicants are usually informed within 60 days, which runs from receipt by the regional office rather than from the appointment abroad. Filing through a consulate adds transmission and correspondence time: the Consulate General in New York reports about 3 to 6 months for declarations measured from the point the completed file is sent to the Czech Republic, and longer where archival research is needed; the Los Angeles consulate reports about 3 to 4 months for citizenship certificates, and Chicago reports regional-office responses in 1 to 2 months. A passport application filed abroad has a 120-day statutory limit and is reported to take about 2 months in practice; domestic passport issuance takes up to 30 days. Missions recommend requesting verification of personal data in the population register before a first passport application, which itself takes up to 30 days.

Official fees (state administrative fees under Act No. 634/2004 Coll., consular amounts per the tariff and the missions' August 2026 fee tables; approximate euro values at about CZK 24 per euro):

• Declaration under §31 or §32: CZK 500 (about EUR 21) filed in the Czech Republic; CZK 1,000 (about EUR 41, USD 47) filed at a consulate (tariff item 159b). Payable regardless of outcome.
• Certificate of Czech citizenship: CZK 100 (about EUR 4) filed in the Czech Republic; CZK 600 (about EUR 25, USD 28) filed at a consulate (item 159a).
• Special registry (Brno) entry of a birth or marriage: no fee for the registration or the first certificate; CZK 200 (about EUR 8) for filing the request through a consulate (item 163); consular verification of copies and translations for the registry, CZK 300 (about EUR 12) per page.
• Passport: CZK 600 (about EUR 25) for adults and CZK 100 for children under 15 in the Czech Republic; CZK 2,400 (about EUR 99, USD 114) and CZK 400 (about EUR 17) respectively at a consulate.
• Naturalisation, where a descendant must use it: CZK 2,000 (about EUR 83) for adults, CZK 500 for minors, with hardship reductions possible.
• Language and civics examination for naturalisation, payable to the authorised examiner (the Institute for Language and Preparatory Studies of Charles University) under §70: CZK 5,700 (about EUR 235) for both parts, CZK 3,700 (about EUR 153) for the language exam alone, CZK 2,000 (about EUR 83) for the civics exam alone, payable again on each resit.

Consular fees are recalculated monthly against the CZK exchange rate. The now-closed §33 declaration carried no fee. These figures exclude document procurement, apostille and translation costs, which are set by third parties.

This page is not updated regularly, and it may not reflect the current position. It is a general account of Czech citizenship law: statutes are amended, time limits expire, and the practice of the competent authorities moves without the legislation moving with it. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is an assessment of your own family’s position.

Whether there is a claim in your case turns on names, dates and documents that no general page can take into account. The questionnaire is where we ask about them, and a lawyer in our citizenship team reads the answers.