CJEU case law on EU citizenship: normatively consistent? Unlikely! - A response to Davies’ ‘Has the Court changed, or have the cases?’
Written by Alexander Hoogenboom, associate researcher at ITEM.
Recent case law of the Court of Justice on EU citizens’ access to benefits has been seen by some as a restrictive turn compared to prior case law, in response to a rise in populism. However, the article by Davies in a recent special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy is to be commended for its original take on this alleged ‘turn to restrictiveness’.
The goal of his article is, as I see it, questioning whether the Court has indeed recently become stricter (in the sense of more State-friendly, less Union citizen-friendly) in response to the populist turn in the European political landscape. In that vein, Davies submits, contrary to what he sees is the main thrust in the scholarship, that the court has been ‘normatively consistent’ (see also this research paper he authored) and that the perceived difference in recent litigation outcomes from the golden years of Union citizenship are due to the litigants being less ‘deserving’ of access to benefits provided by the host Member State: ‘what goes in will provide an overwhelmingly plausible explanation of the outcomes on its own’.
Other blogs:
Also read
-
"It is vital to move from networks to cross-border structures. In addition to vertical integration from the EU, we need to work together on horizontal integration as a structure that connects neighbouring countries to put border obstacles and opportunities on the agenda, analyse them and come to...
-
In the ITEM Cross-Border Impact Assessment 2021, the "Impact analysis into the future of working from home for cross-border workers post-COVID-19" investigated the consequences for taxation and social security of working from home by cross-border workers. Hybrid work is the future, also for the...
-
Not out of possibility, but out of necessity
The last couple of weeks of 2021 were dominated by the cross-border nature of the COVID-19 crisis, and the fight against it. While the Netherlands went into the holiday season under a lockdown, complete closures were largely absent in Germany and...
