Story Of My Thai Citizenship Application

[BKKBike09]

23 hours ago, Badger18 said:

Yes exactly.

It's not. It's more that since you haven't actually complied with the rules, it's reasonable to expect there may be some consequences, and I was asking what they were. It seems like nobody has run into a practical problem so far, which is obviously a good sign, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if everything was above board and there was no "lip service" involved. Of course you can always go ahead and renounce your original citizenship anyway, but if there doesn't look to be any risk in keeping it (and there's no tax angle) it'd be a pretty silly thing to do.

 

Interesting - but the right of abode is based on citizenship, surely, so you're still using your foreign citizenship. The consensus seems to be they don't care anyway, but in that case you can just use both passports.

 

I don't really get why they ask for a letter of intention if the whole thing is a fiction, but I guess it's just a case of TIT.

In the case of Brits, in the past (pre 2018) it was required that applicants executed, in person at the Embassy, a Declaration of Intent to renounce UK citizenship if Thai nationality was granted. It was (is) a criminal offence to make knowingly a false declaration but, as has been pointed out, intentions can change for many reasons. Nowadays the Embassy will not witness this declaration but instead issue a mail order letter which basically says "this person has said they'll give up their British citizenship but UK doesn't care and won't stop him/her having two nationalities". Again, the Thai authorities may not care, but this is making it clear that the embassy expects the person won't do it, so maybe making it harder for the Thai authorities to turn a blind eye.

 

In the past the e-gates of course meant that one never had to deal with an immigration officer rifling through a passport looking for a visa. In these Covid times, however, the e-gates are out of action. This won't be forever and indeed the immigration officers likely don't care, but leaving on a brand spanking new Thai passport with no visa stamps would make it obvious a second passport was being used if on a direct flight to a country where Thai nationals need a visa. Hence flying to, say, UK, via Qatar, or some other country that offers visa free entry for Thais, might be an idea to consider.

 

Thai nationals - those who were born Thai - can hold other nationalities. But naturalised Thais are not allowed to do that, under present regulations. Luckily for Brits, if born before UK Nationality Act 1981, it is allowed to reclaim citizenship if forced to renounce it for the purpose of obtaining a second nationality. It's a drawn out process, but it is an option.

 

Basically any applicant for Thai nationality would be well advised to bear in mind the - however remote it may be - possibility of having to give up one's original nationality.

 

 

[Arkady]

On 12/1/2021 at 12:33 PM, Badger18 said:

The reason they don't require you to give up your existing citizenship in advance will be that you would then be stateless until Thai citizenship was granted, and there's no guarantee at that point that it will be granted. So the fact that it's done that way doesn't mean it's OK to change your mind once your Thai citizenship comes through.

Taiwan does this and it has been a big problem for Vietnamese mail order brides.  Sometimes the marriage breaks up or the husband dies before their Taiwanese citizenship comes through and they have to go back to Vietnam and live there as stateless persons.  Vietnam allows them to surrender their nationality without another one but doesn't allow them to recover their nationality. Often they also have stateless children too who get condemned to a lifetime in limbo.  There's a pretty good reason why most other countries don't allow citizens to renounce their nationality and become stateless.  The Taiwanese attitude in forcing this is disgusting given that citizens born Taiwanese can have as many nationalities as they like.

[Neeranam]

6 hours ago, BKKBike09 said:

but leaving on a brand spanking new Thai passport with no visa stamps would make it obvious a second passport was being used if on a direct flight to a country where Thai nationals need a visa. Hence flying to, say, UK, via Qatar, or some other country that offers visa free entry for Thais, might be an idea to consider.

I guess one needs to weigh up the advantages of a direct flight against being unlucky and getting delayed by an ignorant Immigration officer who doesn't know that there is NO law against a Naturalized Thai having two passports. 

 

[Arkady]

On 12/1/2021 at 5:40 PM, ubonjoe said:

The section in the nationality act confuses a lot of people.

It only means they are old enough at the age of 20 to choose what they want to do instead of their parents.

Section 14 of the Nationality Act is confusing because the amended version in 1993 really was originally drafted with the intent of automatically revoking the Thai nationality of dual citizens by birth, if they didn't explicitly renounce their other nationality between the ages of 20 and 21. Someone rather important must have complained about this because, lo and behold, three weeks later a new amendment was promulgated that changed a few words with the result that dual citizens were instead given the right but not the obligation to renounce Thai citizenship between the ages of 20 and 21, although much of the threatening tone of the original is retained. 

 

The motivation behind the original amendment that allowed the automatic revocation of Thai citizenship was that the nasty mandarins at the MoI were unhappy about being forced by politicians to concede equal rights to Thai women to pass on their citizenship to their children.  Prior to 1993 children born to Thai mothers could only get their father's nationality and, if this was not available, they were stateless, unless the mother went through a revolting and humiliating process of making an afidavit to the effect that she couldn't say for sure who the father was but believed he was Thai. But this was still dependent on official discretion. This was not such a big problem before 1971 when all children born in the Kingdom were automatically Thai but it became a huge problem between 1971 and 1993 which was why politicians sought to change things. The mandarins didn't like the idea of thousands of look krung born to Thai women would automatically be Thai and wanted the power to revoke their Thai citizenship, if they retained foreign citizenship. Fortunately they were thwarted by whoever it was.

[Arkady]

On 12/2/2021 at 3:13 PM, Badger18 said:

Yes exactly.

It's not. It's more that since you haven't actually complied with the rules, it's reasonable to expect there may be some consequences, and I was asking what they were. It seems like nobody has run into a practical problem so far, which is obviously a good sign, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if everything was above board and there was no "lip service" involved. Of course you can always go ahead and renounce your original citizenship anyway, but if there doesn't look to be any risk in keeping it (and there's no tax angle) it'd be a pretty silly thing to do.

 

Interesting - but the right of abode is based on citizenship, surely, so you're still using your foreign citizenship. The consensus seems to be they don't care anyway, but in that case you can just use both passports.

 

I don't really get why they ask for a letter of intention if the whole thing is a fiction, but I guess it's just a case of TIT.

Before 2010 they didn't ask for this and in the MoI interviews some applicants were asked if their country allowed them to retain their citizenship and just said that's nice for you, if the answer was yes.

 

It is reasonable to assume that the reason they started asking for this was, similar to the reason for the attempted backlash by the mandarins against the 1993 amendment allowing Thai women to pass their nationality to their children.  in 2008 the Nationality Act was amended to allow foreign males with Thai wives to apply for nationality without getting PR first and they were exempted from the requirement to have knowledge of the Thai language. We have evidence for the fact there was a backlash in the form of minutes from a meeting of the MoI legal department that declared the original version of the amendment was a threat to national security and insisted on tightening it up so that the foreign males would have to working in Thailand which was not specified in the original draft.  It's a fair guess the mandarins imposed the affidavit requirement to make things harder and less pleasant for the floods of foreigners they expected to marry Thai hookers as a fast track to Thai citizenship. We also know from SB staff at the time that the legal department opined that they were unable to explicitly follow up on this requirement under the Act as it stands.  At the same time as the affidavit was introduced they changed the basis for points allocation.  Gone were the easy points for having a Thai wife and kids, while the points for PR were increased, as were the points for Thai language and the reading and writing tests were introduced along with the Knowledge of Thailand test.  The change in the points allocation was obviously made to make it harder for those without PR and without knowledge of the Thai language.  Obviously the affidavit and the letters to embassies once citizenship is granted are very effective in the case of nationals of countries that prohibit dual citizenship which includes China and India and these two account for a large proportion of applicants, although the trend in the past has been for Chinese and Indians to be more likely to have wives from their own countries and apply via PR.

[GarryP]

13 hours ago, Arkady said:

Section 14 of the Nationality Act is confusing because the amended version in 1993 really was originally drafted with the intent of automatically revoking the Thai nationality of dual citizens by birth, if they didn't explicitly renounce their other nationality between the ages of 20 and 21. Someone rather important must have complained about this because, lo and behold, three weeks later a new amendment was promulgated that changed a few words with the result that dual citizens were instead given the right but not the obligation to renounce Thai citizenship between the ages of 20 and 21, although much of the threatening tone of the original is retained. 

 

The motivation behind the original amendment that allowed the automatic revocation of Thai citizenship was that the nasty mandarins at the MoI were unhappy about being forced by politicians to concede equal rights to Thai women to pass on their citizenship to their children.  Prior to 1993 children born to Thai mothers could only get their father's nationality and, if this was not available, they were stateless, unless the mother went through a revolting and humiliating process of making an afidavit to the effect that she couldn't say for sure who the father was but believed he was Thai. But this was still dependent on official discretion. This was not such a big problem before 1971 when all children born in the Kingdom were automatically Thai but it became a huge problem between 1971 and 1993 which was why politicians sought to change things. The mandarins didn't like the idea of thousands of look krung born to Thai women would automatically be Thai and wanted the power to revoke their Thai citizenship, if they retained foreign citizenship. Fortunately they were thwarted by whoever it was.

My son was born in 1989 prior to the change in the law. As a result his birth certificate said that he was English, even though he was born in Thailand and his mother was Thai. We started the process of trying to get him Thai citizenship and were interviewed by the police in Ubolrathchathani as his mother's house registration was based in Ubol. Fortunately, while we were running about here and there to get him sorted, the law changed and he was automatically qualified as a Thai citizen so the law was retroactive. If I recall correctly, the change in the law was introduced when Anand Panyarachun was Prime Minister in 1992, but perhaps it did not become effective until 1993.

 

They did not issue a new birth certificate though, they just crossed out the part that had changed, wrote in by hand "Thai" and typed some stuff on the back of the certificate. I must admit that the District Office handled it quite well though and were helpful to me, despite it probably being strange to them that this foreigner came to get it sorted instead of the child's Thai mother. 

[DrJoy]

Arkady, why almost 200 pages were removed from this topic? Any particular reason?

 

[Led Lolly Yellow Lolly]

On 12/2/2021 at 11:59 PM, Neeranam said:

Maybe you remember the issue with Abi<deleted>, the PM who had dual citizenship

Everyone should to come to the realisation that anyone who's anyone in Thailand has dual nationality, whether they make it public or try to sit on it. No one will ever be forced to renounce the other.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 4, 2021 by Led Lolly Yellow Lolly

[Arkady]

11 hours ago, GarryP said:

My son was born in 1989 prior to the change in the law. As a result his birth certificate said that he was English, even though he was born in Thailand and his mother was Thai. We started the process of trying to get him Thai citizenship and were interviewed by the police in Ubolrathchathani as his mother's house registration was based in Ubol. Fortunately, while we were running about here and there to get him sorted, the law changed and he was automatically qualified as a Thai citizen so the law was retroactive. If I recall correctly, the change in the law was introduced when Anand Panyarachun was Prime Minister in 1992, but perhaps it did not become effective until 1993.

 

They did not issue a new birth certificate though, they just crossed out the part that had changed, wrote in by hand "Thai" and typed some stuff on the back of the certificate. I must admit that the District Office handled it quite well though and were helpful to me, despite it probably being strange to them that this foreigner came to get it sorted instead of the child's Thai mother. 

You are right.  It was in 1992. My apologies.  Anand was PM, so it was not pushed through by politicians, as there weren't any at that time, but the process may have been started by politicians before the 1991 coup. Certainly the amendment allowing males married to Thais to apply without PR was pushed by politicians. Both amendments were aimed at giving more equal rights to Thai women.

[Arkady]

1 hour ago, DrJoy said:

Arkady, why almost 200 pages were removed from this topic? Any particular reason?

 

Sorry. No idea.

[ubonjoe]

9 hours ago, DrJoy said:

Arkady, why almost 200 pages were removed from this topic? Any particular reason?

 

I am now aware of any pages being removed.

'After one of the updates of the forum the layout was changed so that more posts could be shown on a page.

[Arkady]

8 hours ago, ubonjoe said:

I am now aware of any pages being removed.

'After one of the updates of the forum the layout was changed so that more posts could be shown on a page.

At any rate the number of pages in the thread has always varies depending on what type of device it is viewed on.

[sinthavee]

No pages have been removed. I get to see 238 pages of this topic on my iPhone as well as laptop.

[GabbaGabbaHey]

I think forum admins just increased the number of posts displayed per page, but I'd also support moderators to remove some parts which regularly aim to derail the topic, by people challenging the process when they aren't even applicants themselves.

Edited December 6, 2021 by GabbaGabbaHey
typo

[Arkady]

6 hours ago, GabbaGabbaHey said:

I think forum admins just increased the number of posts displayed per page, but I'd also support moderators to remove some parts which regularly aim to derail the topic, by people challenging the process when they aren't even applicants themselves.

Definitely the thread attracts some haters.  If we miss any inappropriate posts, please feel to PM myself or other mods. I am not sure, if anyone has time to clean up the older pages though, given the size of the thread.

[qualtrough]

When all is said and done, would it be appropriate to give a gift to my SB officer? I am thinking of a bottle of a nice whisky wrapped appropriately.

 

[yankee99]

1 hour ago, qualtrough said:

When all is said and done, would it be appropriate to give a gift to my SB officer? I am thinking of a bottle of a nice whisky wrapped appropriately.

 

Think no problem my wife bought some sort of food probably enough for the office 

[Neeranam]

4 hours ago, qualtrough said:

When all is said and done, would it be appropriate to give a gift to my SB officer? I am thinking of a bottle of a nice whisky wrapped appropriately.

 

My wife took a Buddhist amulet.

[sinthavee]

What is the dead line (number of days or months)within which one needs to get the Thai ID after RG notification or after getting the naturalisation certificate.

One of the approved person in the RG list of Nov 24, is studying in UK & will be completing graduation in around six months, and wants know if taking Thai ID can be postponed without any problems due to lack of time now(getting Thai ID, Passport & getting new UK visa on Thai passport for continuing studies within a span of 2-3 weeks).

Thanks.

 

 

[yankee99]

38 minutes ago, sinthavee said:

What is the dead line (number of days or months)within which one needs to get the Thai ID after RG notification or after getting the naturalisation certificate.

One of the approved person in the RG list of Nov 24, is studying in UK & will be completing graduation in around six months, and wants know if taking Thai ID can be postponed without any problems due to lack of time now(getting Thai ID, Passport & getting new UK visa on Thai passport for continuing studies within a span of 2-3 weeks).

Thanks.

 

 

i believe there is a time frame stated in the letter. Something like 30days

[Neeranam]

1 hour ago, sinthavee said:

What is the dead line (number of days or months)within which one needs to get the Thai ID after RG notification or after getting the naturalisation certificate.

One of the approved person in the RG list of Nov 24, is studying in UK & will be completing graduation in around six months, and wants know if taking Thai ID can be postponed without any problems due to lack of time now(getting Thai ID, Passport & getting new UK visa on Thai passport for continuing studies within a span of 2-3 weeks).

Thanks.

 

 

My letter said 60 days but the SB officer said not to worry about it. 

[DrJoy]

4 hours ago, sinthavee said:

What is the dead line (number of days or months)within which one needs to get the Thai ID after RG notification or after getting the naturalisation certificate.

One of the approved person in the RG list of Nov 24, is studying in UK & will be completing graduation in around six months, and wants know if taking Thai ID can be postponed without any problems due to lack of time now(getting Thai ID, Passport & getting new UK visa on Thai passport for continuing studies within a span of 2-3 weeks).

Thanks.

 

 

He/she should contact SB Police urgently and explain their situation.

You will get the correct answer only from them.

[qualtrough]

I recently saw news that the government had published a law stating that government departments could not demand that people submit copies of documents, and that if they did require copies the office was required to make them themselves at their cost. Is that true? If so, will that apply to the citizenship process? It would be huge if true.

[sinthavee]

On 11/25/2021 at 10:42 PM, jayson1 said:

Thanks for the prompt reply. If I hear from my SB Case Officer, I will also post.

Hi Jayson1 & Qualtrough brothers,

Latest update from SB as of today morning(just before lunch time). It is 21 days from RG notification(24th Nov 2021).

i checked with my SB officer today. He said that their office hasn’t yet received the necessary documents from MOI. Once received, they will be ready to issue the sthai Nationality Certificate & will call.

May be you can contact your respective officers in a couple of days time & check if you haven’t checked yet.

[jayson1]

2 hours ago, sinthavee said:

Hi Jayson1 & Qualtrough brothers,

Latest update from SB as of today morning(just before lunch time). It is 21 days from RG notification(24th Nov 2021).

i checked with my SB officer today. He said that their office hasn’t yet received the necessary documents from MOI. Once received, they will be ready to issue the sthai Nationality Certificate & will call.

May be you can contact your respective officers in a couple of days time & check if you haven’t checked yet.

Thanks for this. I have yet to hear from my SB case officer AND have not received the letter from MOI either. I plan to reach out on Friday and then I can update in the group when I receive a response. 

[david143]

12 hours ago, jayson1 said:

Thanks for this. I have yet to hear from my SB case officer AND have not received the letter from MOI either. I plan to reach out on Friday and then I can update in the group when I receive a response. 

soon, because for our group was on 4th August and i got call from my case officer to pick on 26th August while i was waiting my Second Jab in Vimut.

its soon brother

[qualtrough]

13 hours ago, david143 said:

soon, because for our group was on 4th August and i got call from my case officer to pick on 26th August while i was waiting my Second Jab in Vimut.

its soon brother

I hope you are right. It sure would be nice to start the new year as a Thai citizen.

[Neeranam]

On 12/15/2021 at 9:15 PM, qualtrough said:

I recently saw news that the government had published a law stating that government departments could not demand that people submit copies of documents, and that if they did require copies the office was required to make them themselves at their cost. Is that true? If so, will that apply to the citizenship process? It would be huge if true.

I think you will still have to provide all the copies.

 

https://www.thansettakij.com/politics/505845?fbclid=IwAR0clvxhKBF8AwAGEkp0iQDdgLKyMTRJ0bgsNq9-xBHQqikVd2AGKjoV3wk

[DrJoy]

On 12/15/2021 at 9:15 PM, qualtrough said:

I recently saw news that the government had published a law stating that government departments could not demand that people submit copies of documents, and that if they did require copies the office was required to make them themselves at their cost. Is that true? If so, will that apply to the citizenship process? It would be huge if true.

That order is for Thai citizens only not for `Aliens`

 

Joe, please correct if I am wrong

[Arkady]

1 hour ago, DrJoy said:

That order is for Thai citizens only not for `Aliens`

 

Joe, please correct if I am wrong

The order specifies only ID cards and tabien baan.  Since aliens don't have ID cards, that part can't apply to them and there seems no point in foreigners going to a government department with copies of passport, WP, alien book, residence book and other docs but insisting the officer should make their own copy of the tabien baan, if he wants it.

 

There was an order a couple of years ago saying that government officers could no longer demand a copy of the back of an ID card.  I already had a good quality master copy of my ID card back and front. So I continue to run off copies from that. Of course these orders don't apply to the private sector.

 

Another order said drivers can carry a copy of their driving licence in their phone.  I guess they are moving in the right direction but piles of trees are still being cut down to satisfy Thai bureaucracy. Recently went to change directors of the company and had to submit about 20 different forms and photocopies, some of them merely copies of stuff in their own database.  They even had two sit up and beg Thai typewriters for the public to use because they don't accept handwriting. Amazed that anyone knows how to use them or that they can buy replacement typewriter ribbons.  Still some ways to go to be a digital hub.