European Union citizenship


The European Union citizenship is a legal status afforded to all nationals of member states of the European Union. It was formally created with the adoption of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, at the same time as the creation of the EU. EU citizenship is additional to, as it does not replace, national citizenship. It affords EU citizens with rights, freedoms and legal protections available under EU law.
EU citizens have freedom of movement, and the freedom of settlement and employment across the EU. They are free to trade and transport goods, services and capital through EU state borders, with no restrictions on capital movements or fees. EU citizens have the right to vote and run as a candidate in certain elections in the member state where they live that is not their state of origin, while also voting for EU elections and participating in a European Citizens' Initiative.
Citizenship of the EU confers the right to consular protection by embassies of other EU member states when an individual's country of citizenship is not represented by an embassy or consulate in the foreign country in which they require protection or other types of assistance. EU citizens have the right to address the European Parliament, the European Ombudsman and EU agencies directly, in any of the EU Treaty languages, provided the issue raised is within that institution's competence.
EU citizens have the legal protections of EU law, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and acts and directives regarding protection of personal data, rights of victims of crime, preventing and combating trafficking in human beings, equal pay, as well as protection from discrimination in employment on grounds of religion or belief, sexual orientation and age. The office of the European Ombudsman can be directly approached by EU citizens.

History

The modern EU citizenship status partially relies on the millennia of European history and Europe's common cultural heritage. "The introduction of a European form of citizenship with precisely defined rights and duties was considered as long ago as the 1960s", but the roots of "the key rights of EU citizenship—primarily the right to live and the right to work anywhere within the territory of the Member States—can be traced back to the free movement provisions contained in the Treaty of Paris establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, which entered into force in 1952." The Treaty of Paris introduced freedom of movement for the professionals in the coal and steel industry which may be considered the nascent form of free movement that developed into EU citizenship four decades later. The citizenship of the European Union was first introduced by the Maastricht Treaty, and was extended by the Treaty of Amsterdam. Prior to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the European Communities treaties provided guarantees for the free movement of economically active People, but not, generally, for others. The 1951 Treaty of Paris establishing the European Coal and Steel Community established a right to free movement for workers in these industries and the 1957 Treaty of Rome provided for the free movement of workers and services. However, we can find traces of an emerging European personal status in the legal framework regulating the rights and obligations of foreign residents in Europe well before a formal status of European citizenship was introduced. In particular through the interplay between secondary European legislation and the case-law of the European Court of Justice. This formed an embryo of the future European Citizenship, and came to be defined by the practice of freedom of movement of workers within the newly established European Economic Community.
The rights of an "embryonic" European citizenship have been developed by the European Court of Justice well before the formal institution of European citizenship by the Maastricht Treaty. This could happen after the two landmark decisions in the cases Van Gend en Loos and Costa/ENEL, which established the principle of direct effect of EEC law, and the supremacy of European law over national law, including the constitutional one. In particular, the 1957 Rome Treaty provisions were interpreted by the European Court of Justice not as having a narrow economic purpose, but rather a wider social and economic one.
The rights associated with the European Personal Status were firstly recognized "to certain categories of workers, then expanded to all workers, to certain categories of non-workers, and finally perhaps to all citizens". In line with the model of social citizenship proposed by Thomas Humphrey Marshall, the "European Personal Status" or "Proto-European citizenship" was built by recognizing the social rights connected to freedom of movement and freedom of establishment in the first years of the EEC, when workers' rights in the host state were progressively extended to their family members even beyond the status of "worker", so as to promote the full social integration of the workers and their families in the host member state.
When Regulation 1612/68 abolished movement and residence restrictions for member state workers and their families in the entire EEC territory, thus ending the transitional period established by article 49 of the Rome Treaty, not only this created the conditions for a full exercise of free movement rights, but a number of important new rights were subsequently recognized by the ECJ, such as: the right to a minimum wage in the host state, the reduction of fares on public transport for large families, the right to a check for disabled adults, interest-free loans for the birth of children, the right to reside with a non-spousal partner, the payment of funeral expenses.
As later stated in Levin, the Court found that the "freedom to take up employment was important, not just as a means towards the creation of a single market for the benefit of the member state economies, but as a right for the worker to raise her or his standard of living". Under the ECJ case-law, the rights of free movement of workers applies regardless of the worker's purpose in taking up employment abroad, to both part-time and full-time work, and whether or not the worker required additional financial assistance from the member state into which he moves.
Before the institution of the European citizenship the ECJ interpreted the status of "worker" it beyond its purely literal meaning, progressively extending it to subjects such as non-economically active family members, students, tourists. This led the Court to hold that a mere recipient of services has free movement rights under the Treaty, so that almost every national of an EU country moving to another member state as a recipient of services, whether economically active or not, but provided they do not constitute an unreasonable burden for the host state, shall non be granted equality of treatment had a right to non-discrimination on the ground of nationality even prior to the Maastricht Treaty.
The Maastricht Treaty dispositions on the status of European citizenship were not immediately applied by the Court, which continued following the previous interpretative approach and employed European citizenship as a supplementary argument in order to confirm and consolidate precedent law. It was only a few years after the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht that the Court finally decided to abandon this approach and to recognize the status of European citizen in order to decide the controversies. Two landmark decisions in this sense are Martinez Sala, and Grelczyk.
On the one hand, citizenship has an inclusive character, as it allows its holders freedoms and encourages and enables active participation and active use of these rights. On the other hand, and the following is not meant to diminish this first fact, the inclusion of a certain group results in the differentiation of others. Only through active differentiation and demarcation, i.e. exclusion, an identity with formal criteria can be created.
Due to the history of the EU and its mentioned development, the progress of including and excluding is inevitably full of tensions. Many dynamics in citizenship grounded in the tension between the formal law part and the non-/beyond-law surrounding; such as the enlargement of freedom and rights to every kind of explicitly or implicitly economically active persons. Homeless and poor people do not enjoy these freedoms, because of a lack of economic action. The situation is the same when the home state says someone might no longer enjoy these rights.
Economically inactive EU citizens who want to stay longer than three months in another Member State have to fulfill the condition of having health insurance and "sufficient resources" in order not to become an "unreasonable burden" for the social assistance system of the host Member State, which otherwise can legitimately expel them.

Stated rights

The rights of EU Citizens are enumerated in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Historically, the main benefit of being a citizen of an EU state has been that of free movement. The free movement also applies to the citizens of European Economic Area countries and Switzerland. However, with the creation of EU citizenship, certain political rights came into being.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union

The adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union enshrined specific political, social, and economic rights for EU citizens and residents. Title Five of the CFR focuses specifically on the rights of EU Citizens. Protected rights of EU citizens include the following: