Naturalization despite criminal offences

Principle: A clean certificate of good conduct

An important prerequisite for successful naturalization is that you have not been convicted of a serious criminal offence. The naturalization authority checks this by requesting an extract from the Federal Central Criminal Register in which criminal convictions are entered.

What is not taken into account? - Minor penalties

Not every conviction automatically leads to the rejection of your application. The law stipulates that minor misdemeanours are disregarded when deciding on your naturalization.

Measures from juvenile criminal law

If you were sentenced as a juvenile or adolescent to so-called educational measures or correctional measures, these do not stand in the way of naturalization. The situation is different in the case of a juvenile sentence, which is assessed in the same way as an adult sentence.

Minor fines and prison sentences

The following convictions are not taken into account for naturalization:

• Fines of up to 90 daily rates.
• Prison sentences of up to three months, suspended on probation and remitted at the end of the probation period.

Special case: Several small penalties

If you have been sentenced several times to minor penalties that would not actually be harmful on their own, these will be added together. If the total does not exceed the specified limits, they will not be taken into account. If the court has formed a lower total sentence from several individual sentences, only this total sentence is relevant for the assessment. When aggregating fines and custodial sentences, one daily rate corresponds to one day of imprisonment.

What happens in the event of a minor overrun?

If the total of your sentences only slightly exceeds the above limits, there is a certain amount of leeway. The authorities can decide on a case-by-case basis whether the conviction can still be disregarded. Your entire situation will be taken into account, for example how long ago the offenses were committed and how well integrated you are.

Attention: Stricter rules for hate crime

There is an important exception to the petty offense rules for crimes committed for anti-Semitic, racist or other inhuman reasons. If such a motivation has been established in the court judgment, even an otherwise irrelevant minor penalty stands in the way of your naturalization.

What about convictions abroad?

Convictions that were pronounced against you abroad must also be stated in the naturalization application. These will be taken into account if three conditions are met:

• The offense must also be punishable under German law.
• The conviction must have been handed down in a constitutional procedure.
• The sentence imposed must be proportionate compared to German standards.

What happens during an ongoing investigation?

If you are under investigation on suspicion of a criminal offence, the decision on your naturalization application will be suspended. The procedure will only be continued once the investigation or criminal proceedings have been concluded.

When does a penalty no longer play a role?

Convictions that have already been expunged or are due to be expunged in accordance with the provisions of the Federal Central Register Act may no longer be used to your disadvantage when deciding on your naturalization. This gives you the opportunity to look to the future unencumbered after a certain period of time.