Civil Rights And Eu Citizenship

The process of European integration has had a marked influence on the nature and meaning of citizenship in national and post-national contexts as well as on the definition and exercise of civil rights across Member States. This original edited collection brings together insights from EU law, human rights and comparative constitutional law to address this underexplored nexus. Split into two distinct thematic parts, it first evaluates relevant frameworks of civil rights protection, with special attention on enforcement mechanisms and the role of civil society organisations. Next, it engages extensively with a series of individual rights connected to EU citizenship. Comprising detailed studies on access to nationality, the right to free movement, non-discrimination, family life, data protection and the freedom of expression, this book maps the expanding role of European law in the national sphere. It identifies a number of challenges to core civil rights that the current supranational framework is at pains to address. The contributors suggest and develop several new ideas on how to take the EU integration project forward. Civil Rights and EU Citizenshipprovides an innovative perspective on both the conceptual dimensions and the actual realities of rights-based citizenship which will be of interest to legal scholars, practitioners and policy-makers alike. Contributors include: S. Adamo, P.J. Blanco, S. de Vries, H. de Waele, T. Dudek, M.-P. Granger, K. Irion, Á.E. Menéndez, J. Morijn, P. Phoa, O. Salat, H. van Eijken, J.G. Vega

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This Open Access book investigates European citizenship after Brexit, in light of the functionalist theory of citizenship. No matter its shape, Brexit will impact significantly on what has been labelled as one of the major achievements of EU integration: Citizenship of the Union. For the first time an automatic and collective lapse of status is observed. It is a form of involuntary loss of citizenship en masse, imposed by the automatic workings of the law on EU citizens of exclusively British nationality. It does not however create statelessness and it is likely to be tolerated under international law. This loss of citizenship is connected to a reduction of rights, affecting not solely the former Union citizens but also second country nationals in the United Kingdom and their family members. The status of European citizenship and connected rights are first presented. Chapter Two focuses on the legal uncertainty that afflicts second country nationals in the United Kingdom as well as British citizens, turning from expats to post-European third country nationals. Chapter Three describes the functionalist theory and delineates three ways in which it applies to Brexit. These three directions of inquiry are developed in the following chapters. Chapter Four focuses on the intension of Union citizenship: Which rights can be frozen? Chapter Five determines the extension of Union citizenship: Who gets to withdraw the status? The key finding is that while Member states are in principle free to revoke the status of Union citizen, former Member states are not unbounded in stripping Union citizens of their acquired territorial rights. Conclusions are drawn and policy-suggestions summed up in the final chapter.

This book provides a framework for comparing EU citizenship and US citizenship as standards of equality. If we wish to understand the legal development of the citizenship of the European Union and its relationship to the nationalities of the member states, it is helpful to examine the history of United States citizenship and, in particular, to elaborate a theory of ‘duplex’ citizenships found in federal orders. In such a citizenship, each person’s citizenship is necessarily ‘layered’ with the citizenship or nationality of a (member) state. The question this book answers is: how does federal citizenship, as a claim to equality, affect the relationship between the (member) state and its national or citizen? Because the book places equality, not allegiance to a sovereign at the center of its analysis of citizenship, it manages to escape traditional analyses of the EU that measure it by the standard of a sovereign state. The text presents a coherent account of the development of EU citizenship and EU civil rights for those who wish to understand their continuing development in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Scholars and legal practitioners of EU law will find novel insights in this book into how EU citizenship works, in order to be able to grasp the direction in which it will continue to develop. And it may be of great interest to American scholars of law and political science who wish to understand one aspect of how the EU works as a constitutional order, not merely as an order of international law, by comparison to their own history. Jeremy Bierbach is an attorney at Franssen Advocaten in Amsterdam. He holds a Ph.D. in European constitutional law from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

While the European integration project is facing new challenges, abandonments and criticism, it is often forgotten that there are powerful legal instruments that allow citizens to protect and extend their rights. These instruments and the actions taken to activate them are often overlooked and deliberately ignored in the mainstream debates. This book presents a selection of cases in which legal institutions, social movements, avant-gardes and minorities have tried, and often succeeded, to enhance the current state of human rights through traditional as well as innovative actions. The chapters of this book investigate some of the cases in which the gap between the conventionally recognized rights and those advocated is becoming wider and where traditionally disadvantaged groups raise new problems or new issues are emerging concerning individual freedom, transparency and accountability, which are not yet properly addressed in the current political and legal landscape. Can political institutions and courts without coercive power of last resort actually foster more progressive rights? This book suggests that the expansion of human rights might be a viable strategy to generate a proper European citizenship. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Studies, Politics and International Relations, Law and Society, Sociology and Migration Studies and more broadly to NGOs and policy advisers.

EU citizenship and Free Movement Rights examines how EU citizenship reconstructs in unexpected ways what citizenship as a status means and stands for in relation to family reunification, social rights, expulsion and discusses the effects of Brexit for EU citizens.

This book identifies, analyses and compares a variety of possible ‘barriers’ to the exercise of European citizenship and discusses ways to move beyond these barriers. It contributes in a multi-disciplinary way to a highly topical issue and offers new perspectives on EU citizenship in the sense that it critically analyses concepts of citizenship, the way EU citizenship is politically, legally and socially institutionalized, and elaborates alternatives to the current paths of realizing EU citizenship.

This book critically analyses the case law on EU citizenship in relation to its personal free movement rights, its status on the primary law level, and EU fundamental rights protection. The book exposes the legal space where EU citizenship variably loses or gains legal relevance, and questions how this space can be overcome. Through a thorough analysis of the core personal free movement rights of residence, family reunification, equal treatment and equal political participation, the book demonstrates how the development of the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union has generated a two-tiered legal concept of EU citizenship. Depending on the nature of the legal claim at hand, EU citizenship may appear as a poor legal personhood for exercising free movement rights; sometimes pushing the individual who is in a factual cross-border situation out of the scope of Union law. Contrastingly, in other strands of the jurisprudence, we see EU citizenship and its primary law levelled-rights stretch the jurisdictional scope of Union law, triggering the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights for review of the individual case. The book enhances the understanding of the legal concept of EU citizenship in Union law and contributes to the debate on the future development of EU citizenship, its relationship to the Charter, and the strength of its legal position for the person who exercises freedom of movement.

Although EU citizenship may appear to be a straightforward and unproblematic matter – each citizen of a Member State is a citizen of the Union – there are in fact situations in which EU citizenship status can become a thorny issue, at times even determining the outcome of a case. Because the rights automatically recognized with nationality most clearly involve the fundamental right of moving and residing freely, the case law relating freedom of movement with EU citizenship status is extensive and reaches into many areas of practice at every level. Prompted by the declaration of 2013 as the ‘Year of Citizens’, the author of this book offers a detailed analysis of the rationales underlying the development of the EU citizenship concept, the directives and regulations that define citizen status, and the cases that have so far worked to clarify the meaning and limits of such status, all with particular attention to the obstacles that still come between the actual exercise of rights in everyday life. The multifarious issues raised include the following: the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the EU citizen’s status; changes introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon; limitations on Member States with regard to granting and revoking nationality; participation of EU citizens in the decision making processes governing the EU; right to recourse to the European Ombudsman; right of access to documents; registration at a host Member State’s competent public offices; limitations of entry due to reasons of public policy, public security, and public health; procedural safeguards in the case of measures limiting freedom of movement; the condition of migrant workers; restrictions to freedom of movement for ‘employment in the public sector’; and the condition of family members of EU citizens. An appendix gathers legislative documents most often cited in the case law. Closely examining the various institutions concerned, case law (Member State as well as Court of Justice), and legislative innovations, the author concentrates on identifying and overcoming those obstacles that still prevent full enjoyment of EU citizenship rights. While the clear demarcation of issues will be of especial practical value in anti-discrimination cases, legal academics and jurists will appreciate the book’s signal new contribution to a classic theme of the European Union.

In the 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty introduced the right to free movement for EU citizens. In practice, however, there are substantial barriers to making use of this right, particularly to integration and to accessing the social and welfare rights available. This is particularly true when it comes to accessing social rights, such as social assistance, housing benefit, study grants and health care. This book provides a detailed description and thorough analysis of these barriers, in both law and practice.

European citizenship is facing numerous challenges, including fundamental rights and social justice considerations. These get amplified in the context of Brexit and the general rise of populism in Europe today. This book takes a representative selection of these challenges, which raise a multitude of highly complex issues, as an invitation to provide a critical appraisal of the current state of the EU legal framework surrounding EU citizenship. The contributions are grouped in four parts, dealing with constitutional developments posing challenges to EU citizenship; the limits of the free movement paradigm in the context of EU citizenship; EU citizenship beyond free movement; and, lastly, EU citizenship in the context of the outside world, including Brexit, the EEA and Eurasian Economic Union.