Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

The legal facts contrary to the law are further categorised according to the volitionality and unvolitionality into unlawful legal acts and unlawful legal status . Unlawful legal acts are legal facts that are the results of a volition of a legal subject, that are contrary to the law as a result of breach or failure to comply with a legal obligation, and by which a legal relationship emerges, changes, or terminates. The typical representative of these is a legal delict. 224 The emergence, respectively, termination of the legal relationship of citizenship or nationality is nonetheless never a legal effect of unlawful legal acts; therefore, they are furthermore omitted. On the other hand, unlawful legal status are relevant, concretely, in the case of the termination. These are legal facts which are independent of a legal subject’s volition, which are contrary to the law, and legal effects of which are the emergence, change, or termination of a legal relationship. The contrariness consists in the failure to fulfil the legal circumstances provided for and stipulated by the law. The literature states that an archetypal example of unlawful legal status is a natural disaster; 225 nonetheless, in the context of nationality or citizenship, as an opposite to lawful legal status, it might be ‘non-possession’ of a certain status, such as the Member State’s nationality. Figure V. − Theory of Legal Relationships

224 Ibid 164. 225 Ibid 166.

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