Memo to the Convention: don’t forget importance of citizenhip!

Date: 10/04/03

Pressure is being brought to bear for the Convention on the future of Europe to define citizens' rights. About time too, says Dick Leonard

AT THE heart of the written constitutions of most democratic states is a clause, or group of clauses, defining the rights and responsibilities of citizens. No such clause exists in the draft constitutional treaty being considered by the European Convention, though there are scattered references to citizenship in other clauses.

Nor was citizenship one of the ten subjects referred to working groups of the Convention or chosen for debate by one of its plenary sessions. This extraordinary omission is primarily the fault of the forum's praesidium, which sets its agenda.

Last week ECAS, the European Citizen Action Service (www.ecas.org), an international organisation representing NGOs and concerned citizens, launched a campaign to remedy this deficiency. It published a thought-provoking collection of essays, Rethinking European Citizenship, and ten model articles which it suggests should be added to the draft constitution.

The substance of these articles, which individual members of the Convention are hoping to move as amendments to the draft treaty, is shown in the box on this page.

The concept of European citizenship was introduced by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. It was seen essentially as an "add-on" to national citizenship, and it sought to guarantee citizens of member states the rights of freedom of movement and of residence throughout the EU, the right to vote and stand as a candidate in municipal and European elections, as well as shared diplomatic protection outside the Union.

For the seven million or so EU citizens living in other member states, this represented a useful, if limited, extension of their rights. The 15 million third country nationals legally resident within the Union were - and are - excluded.

The most imaginative, and probably the most controversial, of the ECAS proposals is to offer European citizenship to all third country nationals who have been legally resident in an EU country for a minimum of five years. The case for doing so is persuasively presented by Marisol Garcia, of the Research Centre on Citizenship and Civil Society at Barcelona University.

She argues that "immigrants are economically needed but socially rejected", and are prevented by the absence of basic citizen rights from making an optimum contribution to the societies in which they have elected to live.

This leaves them open to exploitation by unscrupulous employers, restricts their access to many benefit rights, shuts them out from public sector employment opportunities, exposes them to attacks from xenophobic politicians and engenders an inward-looking "ghetto" mentality rather than a willingness to participate in civic society and adapt to the liberal values of the European Union.

Yet they are under the same obligation as national citizens to pay taxes. The famous slogan "No taxation without representation", coined some 250 years ago, evidently does not apply to them.

Several member states have already taken steps to extend at least some of the rights of European citizenship to their long-term foreign residents. The Netherlands, for example, has granted them the right to vote in local elections.

The present Belgian government is committed in principle to following suit. Internal party divisions, however, within the governing coalition thwarted the passage of the enabling legislation, which will have to be considered for a second time by the new parliament due to be elected on 18 May.

Opinions may differ about the details of the ECAS proposal, in particular as to whether five years is the appropriate residence requirement.

Yet that the time is now ripe to guarantee citizenship rights to this large swathe of residents (more than half of them Muslims) can hardly be denied. After the attack on Iraq, it is surely imperative to reassure them that they have a real stake in the community.

For existing EU citizens much still needs to be done to ensure that they benefit in practice, as well as in theory, from the rights conferred by the Maastricht Treaty and subsequent European legislation. The European Commission is at least partly to blame. It has not organised its departments in such a way that any one of them has an overriding responsibility for citizens' rights.

As ECAS Director Tony Venables pointed out in a recent letter to David Byrne, the commissioner for health and consumer protection: "The institutional decision-making process is particularly scattered. Rights to cross borders and reside in another EU country are dealt with by one directorate-general, social rights by a second, qualifications by a third, consumer issues by a fourth and the youth, educational, training mobility programmes by a fifth."

Time, he concludes, for a single commissioner to be given responsibility for all citizenship issues and the implementation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Time, too, for the European Convention to stir itself, and put citizenship where it belongs, in a central position in the new constitutional treaty.

Pressure is being brought to bear for the Convention on the future of Europe to define citizens' rights.

http://www.ecas.org/ http://www.ecas.org/

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