CELS Webinar: 'The Great EU Citizenship Illusion Dispelled? The Evaporation of Equal Treatment for Vulnerable EU Citizens'

Title: The Great EU Citizenship Illusion Dispelled? The Evaporation of Equal Treatment for Vulnerable EU Citizens

Speaker: Professor Charlotte O'Brien, York Law School 

Biography

Charlotte is a Professor in York Law School. She is the PI on the EU Rights & Brexit Hub, a legal action research project advising and supporting organisations working with EU nationals in the UK, and documenting the obstacles they encounter through advice-led ethnography. She has degrees in Law and Social and Political Sciences, and many years of experience of working and volunteering in Citizens Advice offices. She specialises in EU social law and citizenship, and both UK and EU welfare law. Her work focuses on bringing together doctrinal and empirical study, in particular developing new socio-legal research methods to study EU law. She was PI on the ESRC-funded EU rights Project. Her work has been cited in the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the UK Supreme Court, and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Abstract

EU citizenship has travelled a rocky judicial road of recent years. After a few muted suggestions that we may be emerging from the Tyranny of the Directive (2004/38), in C-181/19 Krefeld and C-535/19 A, the CJEU has vigorously reasserted the Directive’s supremacy in C-709/20 CG. A case that emerges as a result of a quirk of Brexit, it could have sweeping implications for EU migrants throughout the EU. It summarily dismissed the relevance of the claimants’ constitutive, domestic right to reside, in the form of pre-settled status, drawing from C-333/13 Dano a sweeping exclusion from equal treatment rights for those not in work and without sufficient resources – finding that there just is no protection from nationality-discrimination in the context of social assistance for EU migrants who do not fulfil the Directive’s criteria. In so doing, the Court ignored C-456/02 Trojani completely, in spite of the claimant’s heavy reliance upon that case. The only effect of having a domestic right to reside, according to the Court, is the opportunity to invoke the Charter of Fundamental Rights as a last resort. Without ever explicitly confronting its own earlier pronouncements and optimism, the Court is in the process of dismantling the primary law right to non-discrimination. The great promise of social solidarity between EU citizens seems ever more illusory.

Zoom registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CDZgL1cfRuq1wtbn-UIotA