With 17 million EU citizens enjoying their right to live in another EU country, over 50% of Europeans cite freedom of movement as the EU’s greatest achievement.
However, challenges remain, as FRA’s report, ‘Making EU citizens’ rights a reality: national courts enforcing freedom of movement and related rights’, shows. It gives examples of how EU citizens from other Member States can be discriminated against, directly or indirectly, because of their nationality. This applies to getting educational grants, housing loans or finding work, for example.
The report looks at national case law related to the rights of EU citizens to reside freely in other Member States.
It shows how courts in different countries vary in the interpretation of the key EU’s provisions regulating EU citizens’ rights. These include the definition of a family member, sufficient resources, or when they can receive benefit. This can affect people’s everyday life, their family, career and well-being. Here legal guidance and training for legal professionals would help to remove the obstacles that prevent people from fully enjoying their rights when moving freely throughout the EU.
The report’s examination of case law also points to restricted voting rights as EU citizens. This particularly applies to voting in municipal or European Parliament elections under the same conditions as nationals of that Member State.
Member States should make greater efforts to get EU citizens that are not nationals of the country they live in to be politically active and vote in European and municipal elections. This includes removing administrative barriers such as proof of residence.
Freedom of movement is one of the EU’s founding principles. What it means in practice to be an EU citizen was further clarified in EU’s Free Movement Directive of 2004. Member States then had to apply this legislation to their national laws. This has led to various problems in all Member States, as this report shows.
Member States should therefore systematically collect data on how the Directive is being applied and identify potential issues of discrimination. This will help improve understanding of the difficulties in applying the Directive. It would also help monitor use of the Directive.
European Commission and European Parliament reports have consistently highlighted the difficulties EU citizens face in enjoying their freedom of movement rights. The Commission asked FRA to carry out the first ever collection of EU-wide case law showing how Member States are applying and interpreting freedom of movement in practice. This report contains an analysis of a sample of this case law.
These findings will allow legal professionals and judges to more effectively ensure EU citizens can fully enjoy the benefits of freely moving and living throughout the Union.
Equality Bodies and Freedom of Movement
Directive 2014/54/EU was adopted in order to facilitate the free movement of EU workers and members of their family. Article 4 of the Directive stipulates that “each Member State shall designate one or more structures or bodies (…) for the promotion, analysis, monitoring and support of equal treatment of Union workers and members of their family without discrimination on grounds of nationality (…) and shall make the necessary arrangements for the proper functioning of such bodies”. When transposing the Directive, over half of the Member States have decided to designate Equinet member equality bodies as Article 4 bodies.
Equality Bodies and Freedom of Movement (2015) The effects of this for equality bodies was outlined in a discussion paper on ”Equality Bodies and Free Movement”, published in 2015, which was followed up by a conference in December 2015 on the challenges and opportunities this Directive poses to equality bodies.
To follow up more concretely on this issue, Equinet has set up a Cluster bringing together equality bodies vested with this new function in order to:
- Build the capacity of equality bodies to fulfil these functions,
- Analyse the main challenges inherent in the new functions,
- Explore the links between the equality and non-discrimination and the new freedom of movement functions,
- Provide a space for peer exchange.
They will meet for the first time in the Autumn 2018.