Toothless European Citizenship / Šimon Uradnik

has described how such a legal relationship emerges and terminates. From the perspective of this theory, citizenship of the Union as the public legal relationship emerges when the legal title in the form of ius tractum intersects with the legal fact of possession of the Member State’s nationality; vice versa , it terminates at the point when the legal title of ius tractum intersects the legal fact of ‘non-possession’ of the nationality of a Member State. Whence it follows that just as the emergence of Union citizenship is not autonomous on the nationality of a Member State, neither is the termination. Nevertheless, what the author has newly discovered is that the sole existence of Union citizenship between those two points — between the emergence and the termination — is of an autonomous nature. The possible consequences of which the author described hereinabove. However, the formstatus in its entirety cannot be considered autonomous since its existence is demarcated, from the one side, by possession of the Member State’s nationality and, from the other, by ‘non-possession’ of the same. In assessing the character of the content-rights of Union citizen ship, whether they are of a nonvicarious nature, the author has initially confirmed that rights do not spring only in the ‘nation-states’ but also in several international regimes for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms; wherefore, such source can be the European Union also, moreover, it is an entity sui generis and not only an international regime. In the following section and in the examination, attention has primarily been paid to political rights enshrined in primary law of the European Union, as these are distinctly exclusive to Union citizens. The author has come to the conclusion that the only true nonvicarious right is the right of European citizens’ initiative since that is directly guaranteed and provided by the European Union without any vicariousness by the Member States and their legal orders. Therefore, the acquis communautaire may stand in this regard by itself. On the basis of these findings, the author argues that — albeit the content-rights element of citizenship of the Union reaches the nonvicarious character to some degree, and albeit the element of the form-status of Union citizenship is autonomous during its sole existence — the legal relationship between the European Union and a citizen of the Union is not of such quality that it would give rise to the qualified legal relation in the form of the direct bond. That is a result of the incomplete autonomous and nonvicariousness character of such legal relationship.

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