Over a period of 60 years, a comprehensive body of economic, civil, social and political rights was created, expanded and consolidated by the EU, its institutions, Member States and citizens. While these rights end at the Union’s external borders, internally, the direction of travel has always been towards the conferring and confirming of rights. In 2016, that trajectory stalled with the UK EU referendum and the decision of the UK to leave the EU. Over the next four years, approximately six million EU citizens living in the UK (EUinUK) and 1.2 million UK citizens living in the EU (UKinEU) lost their EU-citizenship rights, following a referendum in which most of these citizens (UK as well as EU) had no vote.
Scant academic research attention has been paid to the impact of Brexit on the daily lives of the 1.2 million UK citizens living in the EU at the time of Brexit but UK citizens continue to experience problems acquiring and exercising their rights as Withdrawal Agreement (WA) beneficiaries in the EU. British in Europe (BIE) is a French NGO and its volunteers monitor WA implementation and assist UK citizens in the EU27, helping them to secure their rights and to continue to live their daily lives. BIE is the only organization recognized by the EU Commission and UK Foreign Office to represent UK citizens at meetings of the Withdrawal Agreement
Specialised Committee on Citizens’ Rights and we have become citizen experts in the citizens’ rights part of the WA as well as wider EU free movement, mobility and citizenship policies.
In this empirical session we will provide a short introduction to the rights UK citizens in the EU27 maintained in the WA, and outline the negotiating and political processes that got us to that point. In three further presentations we will critically examine and assess the lived experience of WA citizens’ rights implementation in two constitutive countries (Sweden and Denmark) and a declaratory country (Spain), with a focus on the hurdles overcome and solutions found by the UK communities in these countries. We will conclude with an overview of the interrelationship between the WA, EU third country national mobility rights, such as the Long Term Residence Directive 2003, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and discuss how they are affecting UK citizens in the EU post-Brexit.