Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

which are hereinabove described in Introduction. What was essential in the approach of the Court of Justice was the remark that all similar situations — when a Union citizen must renounce his or her original Member State’s nationality to acquire a nationality of another Member State — fall within the ambit of Union law; 89 especially in the case of the involuntarily renounced nationality as it being only a result of a naturalisation procedure requirement, not the will of a person. 90 Moreover, it was stressed that ‘[a] person should not at any time be liable to lose the fundamental status of citizen of the Union by the mere fact of the implementation of that procedure’. 91 Notwithstanding that the Court accepted the Member State’s wish to prevent an individual from having multiple nationalities as legitimate, 92, 93 the assessment to provide a decision must be conducted individually and under the test of proportionality. In the wake of that, the concrete examination of the situation, by contrast to the settled case-law, was provided. The Court of Justice thus found that administrative traffic offences, which had been committed by the applicant and for which she had been deprived of the assurance of naturalisation, cannot constitute a legal ground for a decision whereby an individual loses any chance for regaining the status of a Union citizen. 94 What cannot be omitted are the latest developments in case law with regard to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, with regard to ‘Brexit’. The question of whether the nationals of the United Kingdom retain their citizenship of the Union after the United Kingdom has left the European Union was firstly 89 Something which was not expected by the referring court at all; to that effect, see Case C118/20 Wiener Landesregierung [2022] ECLI:EU:C:2022:34, paragraph 25. 90 Ibid paragraphs 43−44. 91 Ibid paragraph 47. 92 On the basis of the European Convention on Nationality in conjunction with the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. For this purpose, see ibid paragraph 55. 93 D. Kochenov and D. de Groot nevertheless find a failure in this approach, as the Court of Justice uncritically accepts the argument of the referring court justifying Austria’s provisions, for being vehemently opposed to the development and trends in the field of law of nationalities while only Austria and the Netherlands are the only parties to the Chapter One of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. For this purpose and more, see Dimitry Kochenov and David de Groot, ‘Helpful, Convoluted and Ignorant in Principle: EU Citizenship in the Hands of the Grand Chamber in JY’ (2022) 47 European Law Review 6-8 accessed 18 th March 2023. 94 Case C-118/20 Wiener Landesregierung [2022] ECLI:EU:C:2022:34, paragraph 74.

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