Adjudicating Europe

Ibrahim, Teixeira and Rottmann are a trinity of recent citizenship cases that prove how the Court can strive to move on in sensitive areas, despite recent drawbacks.

Ibrahim and Teixeira are vivid family rights cases in which social advantages of non-economic citizens were at stake. In contrast with the recent decision in Förster, the Court appeared now quite happy to do a wide interpretation of then article 18 EC and draw Treaty rights upon children and former spouses of a host State national who decide to stay in the said host State.

Rottmann is rather more spectacular. After struggling with the purely internal situation issue, the Court considered that a German who had obtained German nationality by fraud came indeed under the scope of the Treaties. Disregarding the importance of nationality law in Member States, a sacred domain of national competence, the Court reminded that Member States were even in those terrains subject to Union Law. Therefore, the Court was happy to invite the German Supreme Court to undergo a proportionality test of the decision to revoke Mr. Rottmann’s German nationality.

It is important to remember that AG Maduro, in one of his last Opinions before leaving the Court, warned about the risks of applying then article 18 EC to nationality laws. I made a strong critique of this Opinion, and it appears that the Court has (correctly, I think) taken a similar stance to the one I supported.

Well done for the Court. Citizenship is still moving.

Forward, not backwards.

- Pescatorius