Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

Eurosceptics were no less satisfied since the Member States asserted that ‘being additional’ derived from ‘adding’, wherefore Union citizenship would only add rights and not detract any already given by and in the Member States. 78 1.4 Reins of Development Solely on Shoulders of Court of Justice Since the Reform Treaty came into force, no other amendment concerning citizenship of the Union has been adopted; therefore, the baton of further development has been passed merely to the Court of Justice. Yet, albeit the provision regarding citizenship of the Union was reshaped in the sense of the ‘additionality’, the case-law of the Court has not altered its approach much. One of the important cases regarding the status of Union citizenship and its loss or deprivation was the ruling of the Court of Justice in Case of Tjebbes. 79 The Court of Justice delivered a collective ruling in a case involving former Dutch nationals who, as possessors of multiple nationalities — Dutch and Canadian, Dutch and Swiss, Dutch and Iranian — and as a result of a ten-year long period of not residing in the Netherlands or in the European Union (or not renewing their passport, or not announcing of being interested in not losing the nationality), lost their nationality of the Netherlands automatically. The ruling in this case became more than polarising in terms of the reaction of some scholars. The moreor-less proponents of the decision referred to it as being ‘bold’ 80 since the Court took a stand whereby the somehow empty rule — that the issue of loss of the nationality of a Member State, consequently, of Union citizenship must be assessed according to the proportionality test 81 and decided with due regard to Union law 82 — was filled with new conditions. The conditions that the 78 It has been based on the document ‘Denmark and the Treaty on European Union’ [1992] OJ C 348. 79 See Case C-221/17 Tjebbes [2019] ECLI:EU:C:2019:189. 80 See Stephen Coutts, ‘Bold and Thoughtful: The Court of Justice intervenes in nationality law Case C-221/17 Tjebbes’ (2019) European Law Blog accessed 12 th March 2023; Martijn van den Brink, ‘Bold, but Without Justification? Tjebbes’ (2019) 4/1 European Papers accessed 12 th March 2023. 81 Requirement brought by Case C-135/08 Rottmann [2010] ECLI:EU:C:2010:104, paragraph 55. 82 Requirement brought by Case C-369/90 Micheletti [1992] ECLI:EU:C:1992:295, paragraph 10.

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