Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

resolved in Case of Préfet du Gers. 95 The Court of Justice thus held a ruling in the case of a national of the United Kingdom who had resided in France for a period of time longer than fifteen years. She demanded to be registered on the electoral roll before the municipality in France. Nevertheless, the municipality and the prefect had argued that, with the loss of Union citizenship, she lost the rights attached upon it. In proceeding before the Court of Justice, she claimed that since she had resided outside of the United Kingdom for a period longer than fifteen years, she had not been able to participate even in the referendum on ‘Brexit’ due to British electoral law. Here, the Court of Justice clearly stated that ‘citizenship of the Union requires possession of the nationality of a Member State’, 96 and that ‘the authors of the Treaties thus established an inseparable and exclusive link between possession of the nationality of a Member State and not only the acquisition, but also the retention, of the status of citizen of the Union’. 97 Moreover, in the freshest rulings, 98 the Court describes that nationals of the United Kingdom have not lost their citizenship of the Union as a result of the Withdrawal Agreement but instead as ‘an automatic consequence of the sole sovereign decision […] to withdraw’. 99 Whereby scholar dispute on the possession of Union citizenship by United Kingdom’s nationals after ‘Brexit’ has been ended. This issue is further utilised in the examination in Chapter 3.2.4. To conclude this chapter; for many years has citizenship of the Union not only been the ‘fundamental status of all nationals of the Member States’ but also a dynamic 100 element of European integration, as this chapter has been intended to highlight. Although the content, rights, historically preceded the form, status, as is evident from Case of Micheletti, where the Court of Justice laid the foundations for then future Union citizenship even without citizenship of the Union yet

95 See Case C-673/20 Préfet du Gers [2022] ECLI:EU:C:2022:449. 96 Ibid 46. 97 Ibid 48.

98 See Case C-499/21 P Silver and Others v Council [2023] ECLI:EU:C:2023:479; Case C-501/21 P Shindler and Others v Council [2023] ECLI:EU:C:2023:480; Case C-502/21 P Price v Council [2023] ECLI:EU:C:2023:482. 99 Case C-499/21 P Silver and Others v Council [2023] ECLI:EU:C:2023:479 paragraph 45. 100 As was Union citizenship described by the Commission. To that effect, see Katerina Kalaitzaki, ‘Chapter 4 EU Citizenship as a Means of Broadening the Application of EU Fundamental Rights: Developments and Limits’ in Nathan Cambien and Dimitry Kochenov and Elise Muir (eds.), European Citizenship under Stress (Brill | Nijhoff 2020) 45.

26