South African and EU dual citizenship travelling to the UK

score:4

Accepted answer

When border officers look at the stamps in your passport, they are looking for other stamps from their country (or from countries with which they share border control responsibilities, as with the Schengen area). They look for these stamps because they want to see whether you have been spending too much time in their country, in which case they would deny you entry.

Border officers are not generally concerned with how you got to the border, nor with how long you stayed in other countries.

Also, you probably won't get a stamp in your EU passport when you enter the UK. EU border officers generally do not stamp EU passports because of the freedom of movement rules in the EU.

Upvote:1

Dual or multi-nationalities are not uncommon in the world and border/custom officials are used to dealing with multinationals. When you arrive at an EU port, and you present an EU member state passport, you are entering the EU as an EU national, end of story. You have an absolute right to entry, and your passport WILL NOT be stamped. The same applies to South Africa, you are a national re-entering and you have an absolute right of entry as a SA citizen.

It is a total non issue.

Upvote:3

I'm a dual passport holder too (SA and NZ), but frankly it's not an issue anyway. There are many instances of several countries that don't even stamp you on exit (or entry) (currently or in recent past).

For example, the US has no exit immigration. Australia requires actually asking to even get a stamp. Switzerland didn't stamp me when I went through (2007), to my frustration.

The point being that there are many possible places you could have come from, and they may legally not have stamped you. Or you could have used a different passport (also legal).

So basically, no, it won't be a problem. Generally you're expected to use the same passport going in and out of a country, but switching like this is no problem.

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