While the European Parliament adopted, on Tuesday 28 March, its mandate on the revised directive on the status of long-term residents (LTRs) in the EU (see EUROPE 13151/7), the Member States continued their work on the same day on the basis of new ideas presented by the Swedish Presidency of the EU Council.
The Swedish Presidency proposed, among other things, adjustments to the calculation of the length of residence required to obtain LTR status and the type of residence permit that can be used to calculate the five years of minimum residence in a Member State, which has become three years in the European Parliament’s mandate, including periods spent in different Member States.
“It is not clear if residence in a Member State with a visa or permit during the suspension of a removal decision could lead to LTR status according to the Commission’s proposal”, the Presidency states in a preparatory note for the working group.
“The objective of temporary residence permits due to a suspended removal decision is not for the third country national to be integrated but rather an acceptance of the person’s presence on the territory until the removal decision can be enforced. The Presidency has therefore suggested to explicitly exclude this category from the scope”, the text adds.
On the calculation of periods of residence, the Presidency compromise proposal provides that any period of residence with a residence permit or long-stay visa in a Member State should always be taken into account in the calculation of the time needed to acquire LTR status.
“However, in contrast to the Commission’s proposal, the Presidency suggests that this provision would not be applicable when cumulating periods in different Member States. Furthermore, the Presidency suggests that third country nationals would only be able to make use of such permits for the first two years for the purposes of reaching the required 5-year period”, the document explains.
The compromise proposes the following wording: “Member States shall grant long-term resident status in the EU to third country nationals who have resided legally and continuously on their territory for the five years immediately preceding the submission of the relevant application. For the purpose of calculating this five-year period for the first two years any period of legal and continuous residence spent as holder of a long-stay visa or residence permit issued under Union or national law shall be taken into account”.
For beneficiaries of international protection, the required period of legal and uninterrupted residence is three years, Sweden also proposes, establishing a link with the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation.
For the criteria for granting status, it proposed that Member States “may not impose a minimum income level, below which all applications for EU long-term resident status would be refused”.
The Swedish Presidency also looked at the control measures available to Member States to ensure that the requirement of legal and continuous residence is met.
It also wants to ensure that the automatic granting of LTR status to the children of the status holder is conditional on those children being resident in the EU. This would help to mitigate the perception that this automatic granting is more favourable than some of the provisions made for children of EU nationals under the 2004 Directive on the free movement of EU citizens.
Links to the compromises: https://aeur.eu/f/64b ; https://aeur.eu/f/64c (Original version in French Solenn Paulic)