EU Chief Negotiator on the withdrawal of the UK from the EU Michel Barnier, speaking on Friday 5 May, stressed the scale of the task of preserving the rights of 4.4 citizens (3.2 million EU citizens living in the United Kingdom and 1.2 million Britons living in the EU) after Brexit.
“We first need to tackle the rights of citizens and the orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom”, said Barnier at the State of the Union conference organised by the European University Institute of Florence (see other article). He added: “It is also a political necessity: we will not discuss our future relationship with the UK until the 27 member states are reassured that all citizens will be treated properly and humanely. Otherwise, there can be no trust when it comes to constructing a new relationship with the UK”.
The French politician, speaking exclusively in English, highlighted a number of specific issues that will have to be settled in the negotiations that will begin in mid-June if Theresa May is returned to power in the UK. From the date that Brexit becomes effective and for the entire future lives of the citizens concerned, the right to unemployment benefit must be guaranteed, for example, for a Polish car worker who decides to return to his own country to seek work. The same goes for the pension rights of, for instance, the Spanish widow of a British national or for a Scottish designer who, after working ten years in Hungary and finishing his career in Glasgow wants to aggregate all his pension periods after returning to the UK. And if the daughter of that Scotsman decides to stay and go to university in Budapest, she will have to have the same rights as a Hungarian student!
Repeating that the 27 member states had made this issue a priority (see EUROPE 11778), former internal market commissioner Barnier anticipated that preserving citizens’ rights will be “both easy and complex at the same time”. He said that it should be easy for the EU and the UK to agree on general principles, “but it will not be as easy to formulate all these principles neatly in a legally precise text”.
He listed a series of principles that, in his view, need to be affirmed: - the level of protection afforded under EU law must not be watered down; - equal treatment for the 4.4 million people affected; - the Court of Justice of the EU must remain the competent court in enforcing the rights of British citizens in the EU and EU citizens' resident in the UK.
Speaking in a later panel discussion, European Justice Commissioner Věra Jourová highlighted the irony of the withdrawal of a country from the European Union making people realise the extent of the rights conferred by European citizenship. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)