UK nationals cannot automatically retain rights as EU citizens after Brexit, the EU’s top court confirmed on Thursday (15 June).
The appeal was brought by British citizens living in the UK and in a handful of EU member states, challenging the Brexit withdrawal agreement on the grounds that it had deprived them of rights that they had exercised and acquired as EU citizens.
The claimants had demanded that the court annul or partly annul the January 2020 decision by the EU to approve the Withdrawal Agreement.
In a judgement that upheld a previous General Court ruling, the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice stated that “the loss of the status of citizen of the European Union, and consequently the loss of the rights attached to that status, is an automatic consequence of the sole sovereign decision taken by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union, and not of the withdrawal agreement or the Council’s decision.”
The ruling, which does not come as a surprise, effectively confirms that people from third countries or former member states can only acquire EU citizenship by becoming a citizen of a member country in the bloc.
The status of Britons still living and working in the EU, and their EU counterparts in the UK has been one of the most delicate issues in the Brexit process. While around 1.3 million British people are currently settled in the EU, and have acquired residency status in a member state, UK lawmakers have pointed to serious problems with residence schemes affecting British citizens who were already living in the EU before Brexit.
Earlier this year, the Danish government announced plans to change its domestic law to lift the threat of deportation for UK nationals who had been late applying for residency status, though similar threats exist in Sweden, which has deported over 1,000 British nationals, and other member states.
In May, the UK parliament’s EU committee raised concerns with Home Secretary Suella Braverman that resources to support UK citizens in the EU had been scaled back substantially since 2021 with no official organisation to provide advice to British people settled in the EU. They added that there is no equivalent of the Independent Monitoring Authority, which exists to protect the rights of EU citizens in the UK.
At the latest meeting of the EU-UK committee on citizens’ rights, UK ministers claimed that UK nationals who have not made an application for permanent residence were facing difficulty in accessing benefits and services.
[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]
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