Watch Charlotte O’Brien’s webinar with CELS: “The Great EU Citizenship Illusion Dispelled?”

The Centre for European Legal Studies webinar which took place on October 20th 2021 is now available in full on youtube. Watch it now to hear all about Professor Charlotte O’Brien’s paper on the CJEU judgment in C-709/20 CG.

Full title: "The Great EU Citizenship Illusion Dispelled? The Evaporation of Equal Treatment for Vulnerable EU Citizens"

Speaker: Professor Charlotte O'Brien, York Law School

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.