Cross-Task Analysis (Deliverable 7.7)
Creators: name: Henri, De Waele
name: Solis Santos Teresa
name: Sybe, De Vries
name: Hanneke, Van Eijken
name: Phoa Pauline
name: Granger Marie-Pierre
name: Salat Orsolya
name: Jiménez Blanco Pilar
name: Espiniella Menéndez Ángel
name: González Vega Javier
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2017
Subjects: EU citizenship
Cross-task anaylsis
barriers to rights

description: As noted in the official ‘Description of Work’ in the original proposal for establishing the bEUcitizen project, the objective of Work Package 7 is to study, from the perspective of European Union citizenship, specific problems individuals face in exercising their civil rights and liberties in areas which fall within, but also in areas that lie beyond the scope of EU law.

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In the legal EU context, fundamental rights, including civil rights, have recently not only gained visibility, but also acquired an increasing significance. This is particularly so since the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), which turned the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights into a legally binding document. However, well before the Treaty of Lisbon, the civil rights of EU citizens, in particular those of free movement and non-discrimination, had already gained legal recognition in EU law through the case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

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The civil rights that have been studied in WP7 concern the set of rights necessary for the exercise of individual freedoms, whose exercise encounters significant legal, practical or policy difficulties. These include inter alia the right to free movement and the right to equal treatment (non-discrimination), the right to family life, the freedom of expression, the right to privacy, the freedom of religion, the right to property, the right to an effective judicial remedy and the protection against loss of citizenship. The right to gain access to travel documents, essential to the freedom of movement and of residence, was included as well. The foregoing were studied from the perspective of EU citizens, but also from that of third-country nationals, who enjoy certain rights on the basis of EU law (either derived rights as family member of EU citizens or under EU legislation concerning third-country nationals).

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The scope of civil rights EU citizens enjoy on the basis of EU law is limited, as they can only be invoked against EU institutions and against Member States when implementing EU law (which should seemingly be understood as all situations that fall within the scope of EU law). A nagging uncertainty persists however as to when EU civil rights can be relied upon to challenge domestic restrictive measures or practices. Moreover, the scope of the residence rights that come with EU citizenship has traditionally been limited to transnational situations. The latter has produced unpalatable differences in the protection afforded by EU citizenship and the EU ‘Bill of Rights’ to mobile EU citizens who exercised their rights of free movement on the one hand, and to ‘sedentary’ EU citizens who have not on the other. Some case law of the ECJ suggests that there is a core body of citizenship rights which may be enjoyed without having to prove a transnational dimension, but the contours have remained unclear, and so far a further elaboration has not been forthcoming.