Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

of Article 50(1) TEU and not of the Withdrawal Agreement or the decision at issue.’ 248 In other words, the legal title for the termination of the public legal relation of Union citizenship in the case of Britons was not enshrined in the Withdrawal Agreement or other related acts but in the simple fact that the United Kingdom has become the Third State; wherefore, its nationals have lost the Member State’s nationality whereby they find themselves in the unlawful legal status of ‘non-possession’ of the nationality of a Member State. To conclude this chapter; the answer to the question of whether the formstatus of Union citizenship may be considered autonomous depends on about which part of the formstatus one poses the question. By the postulates of the normative legal theory on legal relationships, the author has found that the emergence and the termination of Union citizenship as a public legal relationship is of a derivative nature as a result of ius tractum . Citizenship of the Union cannot be acquired differently than by the acquisition of a Member State’s nationality; wherefore, it cannot emerge autonomously. At the same, an individual, whose nationality of a Member State has been lost, cannot be a Union citizen beyond the point of that loss; therefore, it terminates derivatively. The only part and the only segment of the form-status of Union citizenship, which the author hence considers autonomous, is the sole existence between the point of the emergence and the termination of that public legal relationship. Once the intersection of the legal title and the legal fact for the emergence appears, citizenship of the Union exists autonomously and is not affected by any action of a Member State, nevertheless, only up to the point when the intersection of the legal title and the legal fact for the termination occurs. The element of the bond of the direct bond is present in citizenship of the Union only during this autonomous existence. Once the nationality of a Member State is lost, the bond does not exist any longer. On the scope of the derivative emergence and termination, the author agrees with the Court of Justice, which states: ‘By Article 9 TEU and Article 20 TFEU, 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.’ 249 In other words, the authors of the Treaties established the legal title not only for the emergence but also for

248 Case C-499/21 P Silver and Others v Council [2023] ECLI:EU:C:2023:479 paragraph 45. 249 Case C-118/20 Wiener Landesregierung [2021] EU:C:2022:34, paragraph 48.

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