The Tjebbes Fail

Abstract

This note briefly analyses ten most significant untenable assumptions underlying the European Court of Justice’s ruling in Tjebbes, where the Court departed from earlier case-law by essentially tolerating the annulment of EU citizenship ex lege as a result of a non-renewal of a Member State passport, thus introducing direct discrimination between different groups of EU citizens and legitimizing the treatment of law-abiding EU citizens worse than known terrorists and ISIS wives. EU citizenship has thus lost its proverbial ‘fundamental status’, downgraded to outright irrelevance for no tenable reason.

Keywords: Tjebbes, Dual nationality, Expatriation, Proportionality, EU federalism