MMO 2024

Silvia Adamo, Postdoctoral Fellow, bEUcitizen – Barriers to European Citizenship/Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen What are the legitimate expectations regarding integration before family reunion in a Member State, and what is the position of Turkish citizens in that equation? The EU Directive on family reunion for third-country nationals gives Member States an option to impose such integration requirements before entry of the family members, and the CJEU dealt with the limits to the discretion of Member States in imposing such requirements in a 2015 judgment ( K and A , discussed here ). Moreover, in the Dogan judgment of 2014 (discussed here ), the Court assessed the reach of the standstill clause in the protocol to the Association Agreement between EU and Turkey in relation to the conditions for family reunification for self-employed Turkish nationals. There’s an important distinction between the two legal instruments: all Member States are bound by the EU/Turkey...

Steve Peers Until yesterday, I have consistently argued that the prospect of British citizens being subject to visas for short-term visits to the EU after Brexit was highly remote. In fact, I even told off some ‘Remain’ supporters who suggested that this might happen. EU policy is consistently to waive short-term visa requirements for wealthy countries (like the USA, Canada and Japan) as long as those countries waived short-term visa requirements for all EU citizens in return. I couldn’t imagine that it was likely that anyone on the ‘Leave’ side would wish to advocate short-term visa requirements for EU citizens visiting the UK after Brexit, thus damaging the British tourist industry and leading to a reciprocal obligation for UK citizens to get visas for short visits to the EU. Incredibly, I was wrong on this. Yesterday, Dominic Raab, a senior figure on the Leave side, suggested that the UK might want to introduce visas for EU citizens after Brexit, and accepted that U...

Tamara Hervey , Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law, The University of Sheffield Who would have thought that the NHS would be such a significant aspect of the debate on the UK’s membership of the EU? With campaigns for the referendum on 23 June 2016 underway, all sorts of claims are being made about the effects of EU membership on the NHS, and people have been rightly wondering whether they are accurate. Here are some of the questions that I have been asked (others are covered here ): Q1.   What influence does the EU have on the NHS now – does the EU make decisions about our NHS? Q2.   What – if anything – do EU membership; the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP); and the NHS have to do with each other? Q3.   Assuming the EU agrees to the TTIP, how does EU membership impact, or not, on ‘privatisation’ of the NHS? Q4.   How – if at all – would it be different if the UK left the EU? Q5.   Would being in the EU pre...

Dr. Maja Brkan and Alexander Hoogenboom On 6 April 2016, the Dutch voters – not surprisingly according to the recent polls – rejected the EU-Ukraine association agreement with 61.1 percent of votes against. While the voters came just above the 30 percent threshold, the result itself seems to be quite a convincing “nee”. The EU has so far concluded numerous association agreements with other countries, for example with Algeria , Tunisia , Morocco , Israel , Egypt , Chile and, most recently , Kosovo . So why was the referendum organised exactly regarding Ukraine? Summer fun? The reason is both banal and worrying. The so-called ‘Citizen’s Committee-EU’ (Burgercomité EU), which was behind the initiative, publicly and boldly stated prior to the vote that they ‘ did not care about the Ukraine ’: the referendum was meant solely to weaken the EU, as well as to put the relationship between the EU and the Netherlands under pressure. The Association Agreement was simp...