An ancient and beloved Hungarian folktale is the story of King Matthias and the Clever Girl. According to the story, King Matthias the Just, who often wandered about Hungary in disguise to see how the plain folk were living, was insulted by a village alderman. Matthias, upon his return to court, decreed that the alderman should be hanged. The alderman’s daughter begged the King to reconsider: Matthias then decreed that he would pardon the alderman, if the daughter could perform a number of impossible tasks. The final task that the King set for the girl was to visit him at the Royal Court – but not in any ordinary way. King Matthias decreed that the girl must not travel on foot, neither riding an animal, nor riding a carriage; that she should be dressed up but at the same time come naked; and that she should bring a gift, but also not bring any gift at the same time.
Seemingly, the Hungarian government has been taking inspiration from this ancient folktale when deciding to amend the Fundamental Law of Hungary for the fifteenth time in as many years. The proposed new provisions include some new homophobic declarations, some modifications on declaring and sustaining a state of emergency, and one new provision creating a constitutional right to pay with cash. One of the new provisions, however, creates an entirely new but almost paradoxical concept in citizenship law: the suspension of citizenship. Article G, paragraph (3) of the Fundamental Law will read as follows:
Nobody can be deprived of Hungarian citizenship if it was attained through birth or through lawful naturalization. A Hungarian citizen who is also a citizen of another state – with the exception of states whose citizens have the freedom of entry and residence [in Hungary] – may have their citizenship suspended for a definite period of time in accordance with the provisions of a cardinal law. Group suspension shall not be permitted.
As a matter of legal doctrine, the suspension of citizenship is both unprecedented and barely intelligible. Even the policy goals of the amendment are hazy: suspicions are that the objective is to deport or otherwise remove from Hungary certain anti-Fidesz politicians, ahead of the 2026 elections, who happen to be Hungarian-Canadian dual citizens. The spokesperson for the government has denied these allegations. The amendments are couched in a larger campaign against “intrusions into Hungarian sovereignty” that has been ongoing for more than two years now. Opposition parties and media outlets that have accepted foreign funding (including from USAID) are in the crosshairs of the government in particular.
Exact doctrinal details, for the moment, are unavailable because the cardinal law that will actually regulate the suspension of citizenship in Hungary does not yet exist and has not yet been proposed. (Cardinal laws, under Article T, paragraph 4 the Fundamental Law of Hungary, are laws that can only be modified by a two-thirds majority in Parliament; accordingly, they can be called part of the “extended constitution” of Hungary.) Even without having any details on the imposition and implementation of the suspension of citizenship, some jurisprudential and international legal comments are warranted.
The exception of “states whose citizens have the freedom of entry and stay” from suspension – basically meaning EU and EEA states and their (dual) nationals – is doubtless intended to limit clashes with EU law on this matter. Such clashes will nevertheless appear: to begin with, other EU member states, and eventually the CJEU, have to decide whether a Hungarian citizen “under suspension” still enjoys all the rights of EU citizens in other states.
From the perspective of the law of nationality, it is worthwhile to consider the suspension of citizenship in the context of the creation of statelessness. As Neha Jain has argued, statelessness is generally not the result of mistakes in registering newborn children or technical inconsistencies between different countries’ nationality laws. Instead, statelessness is manufactured on purpose, by creating nationality laws that deliberately exclude certain minorities. One of the most prevalent techniques for this manufacturing, nicknamed “Schrödinger’s Citizenship” both by Bronwen Manby and by myself, and “Ghost Citizenship” by Jamie Chai Yun Liew, is for State A to insist that a person is the citizen of State B, while State B insists that the person is the citizen of State A.
The suspension of citizenship seems to be another technique for the manufacture of (de facto) statelessness. The notion of suspension is essentially an in-between, yes-and-no, depends-for-certain-purposes status, which allows Hungary both to strip rights from certain individuals and to deny that these people have thereby become stateless or rightless. It is reminiscent of the “legal black hole” of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where the ostensible difference between U.S. jurisdiction and Cuban sovereignty was played off against one another, to leave prisoners in the prison camp there without any recourse under either U.S. law or international law (until Boumediene v. Bush, at least).
Does the proposed suspension of citizenship infringe the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness? Probably not: only Articles 8 and 9 of the Convention apply to the loss of citizenship, and these articles only set two obstacles to the revocation of citizenship. Article 8 prohibits the deprivation of nationality, if that would result in a person becoming stateless – but the provisions of the Fundamental Law on suspension apply exclusively to dual nationals, thereby averting any discussion on whether the suspension of citizenship is equivalent to a form of statelessness. Article 9 prohibits the deprivation of citizenship “on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds,” and here, eventual practice may prove to violate the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. But Hungary is also a party to the European Convention on Nationality, which only allows the deprivation of citizenship, at the initiative of a state party, for “conduct seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the State Party” (Art. 7 (1) (d)). Infractions of both international law and European law seem inevitable.
Of course, speculation about the unlawfulness of this new gambit under international law is quite spurious, without knowing any details about the contents and procedural safeguards of imposing the suspension of citizenship. But perhaps this is the point. There are two reasons to think so: one of them tied to statelessness as a legal category, and the other one tied to the nature of authoritarian politics.
Citizenship is a status that may or may not mean access to rights – as Dimitry Kochenov, Kristin Surak (11-12) and Alison Kesby (31-38) have reminded us, almost every human being is a national of one state or another, yet nationality does not necessarily mean access to meaningful rights (as any Sudanese, Afghani or North Korean citizen could testify). On the one end of the spectrum, a non-citizen could have access to basically every right that a citizen has, except for the right to vote and be elected to office (e.g. as permanent residents do in Canada, following Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia). At the other end of the spectrum, lack of citizenship may come close to outlaw or homo sacer status, where one has no rights whatsoever (described with striking force by Hannah Arendt, at 290-302). Without details on what the suspension of citizenship means, we cannot know which one of these the new Hungarian regulation is going to be.
This leads us to the second point: perhaps it is not going to be anything. As Adam Tooze has recently reminded us:
MAGA is full of ****. If you don’t know this yet you have not been paying attention. They say and do stupid things that gesture towards a nationalist populist strategy in a flailing way. But most of their utterances are incoherent word salad masquerading as policy.
What is true of MAGA, is a fortiori true of the Hungarian regime, the Ur-MAGA. In many cases, legislation brought by an extreme right-wing populist regime is not law in the sense that it is designed to bring about changes to human behaviour in an orderly manner, in the pursuance of rational policy goals. Instead, legislation itself can be a form of “flooding the zone”, of bull**** in the philosophical sense, of propaganda and misinformation. Unintelligible or overly vague legislation can reap political dividends, as Michael Albertus showed in the context of “property without rights” in Latin America, and Daniel Ghezelbash demonstrated with regard to the implementation of refugee law. The notion of suspended citizenship currently seems like such legislative bull****: perhaps only lying around as a distraction, without an implementation mechanism; perhaps waiting to be implemented in more dictatorial times.
(Epilogue: For those wondering how the folktale ends, here is how the clever girl overcame the impossible conditions and outsmarted the King. She came to the Court riding a billy-goat with her feet touching the ground. Therefore, she traveled neither by foot, nor riding an animal. She came wearing only a fishing net, so was both naked and dressed at the same time. And she brought a dove in a cage with her, which she released when meeting the King: so she both brought a gift with her and didn’t bring any gift at the same time.)