Гражданство Европейского союза: нонсенс или объективная закономерность в международном праве

Abstract

The right to citizenship is one of the fundamental rights every individual is entitled to. The implicit content of this right presupposes a certain aggregate of mutual rights and obligations of the state, on the one hand, and the citizen, on the other. One of the most interesting innovations envisaged by the Maastricht Treaty on the formation of the European Union which has come into force since 1.1.93 is establishing within the EU of a single European citizenship. From the juridicial point of view this legal institution is absolutely unique: the EU not only is not a state but it does not have the status of juridicial subject in international law either. Nevertheless, the Maastricht Treaty makes an explicit statement precisely about the citizenship of the EU. What is it: a certain (possibly accidental) political legal phenomenon which has not been known to international law before, or a sufficiently objective regularity, a result of extremely rapid integration processes within the interstate relations, a result of global reassessment of the role and place of individual within this system? A detailed analysis of the respective norms of the Maastricht Treaty shows three very specific peculiarities of the single European citizenship. First and foremost, it concerns such important component as the obligations of the citizens of the European Union, which (i.e. obligations) are not given concrete expression in the corresponding Section of the Maastricht Treaty regarding single European citizenship. Secondly, one special attention should be paid to the potentially dynamic character of the EU citizenship, which is confirmed by the absence of strict and finally defined list of the rights of EU citizen and also by the provision for the EU Council of Ministers to take certain measures aimed at strengthening of present rights and the development of new ones in addition to the latter. Thirdly, a characteristic feature is the fact that a EU citizenship does not substitute national citizenship being only additional to it. This article attempts to study in detail and analyze the content and peculiarities of every right given to the EU citizen, in order to find out the real nature and essence of the single European citizenship. These rights are the following: — a right to move freely and get residence on any territory of the EU; — to participate in the elections as a voter and be nominated as a candidate at the municipal and the general European elections in the country of residence; — to have the protection of diplomatic missions and consulates of every EU Member State when outside the EU; — to appeal with petitions and claims to Europarliament in accordance with appropriate procedures. As can be seen, this list is very limited. It obviously does not correspond to the volume of rights that is envisaged in the national constitution of the citizens. Moreover, the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty on EU citizenship have a rather general nature and do not give a concrete expression of the legal rights of separate groups of population such as women, the unemployed, pensioners, youth and the disabled. In general, we can suppose that the authors of the Maastricht Treaty were guided most of all not by the well-known and universal legal structures during the development of the concept of the EU citizenship, but by their own beliefs and ideas that the very establishment of the single European citizenship will give a new impulse to international processes on the continent, will become an active driving force within the framework of the "self-renewing" Europe and provide guarantees of real protection of human rights and freedoms. In this connection, the establishment of the EU citizenship can in fact be regarded as a step which had rather political than legal meaning in the period of its completion. The problem under consideration seems to be especially topical in light of the current integrational initiatives of the Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation aimed at, inter alia, the development and further implementation of the concept of the single citizenship of the Union of Belarus and Russia.