Ruvi Ziegler, Jo Shaw, and Rainer Bauböck (eds): Independence referendums: Who should vote and who should be offered citizenship. EUI Working Paper RSCAS 2014/90 . Read More …
A number of EU citizens resident in the UK complained that they found themselves unable to vote in the elections for European Parliament there, because of the complicated registration system. Even people who have been on the electoral rolls and had voted in local elections before were expected to ‘opt in’ in order to vote for MEPs in the UK, otherwise they were supposed to be voting for MEPs in their home country. Such a default rule runs against the spirit of free movement which supposes that EU citizens shall exercise their rights where they live. It is even more problematic as come countries, including the UK itself, restrict the voting rights of their non-resident citizens and the European Commission had already expressed concern about it earlier this year.
Read more in the Guardian.
Read more about disenfranchisement and Commission’s action.
The editor of the respected newspaper Die Zeit Giovanni di Lorenzo, who has both German and Italian citizenship, boosted on a prime time talk show that he has voted twice in the elections for European Parliament last weekend. Dual citizens Read More …
Last week German Bundespräsident Joachim Gauck hosted a ceremony of naturalization in his residence Schloss Bellevue. In his address to 22 new citizens he called for a new understanding of German identity. Germany’s head of state pointed to a need for accommodating immigrants also in a symbolic way: “There is a new German ‘we’, the union of the diverse.” At the same time, he hailed the successful integration of 16 million immigrants since the republic’s birth. The former pastor promoted an affirmative approach to immigration as a precondition for discussing in a relaxed manner the problems of an immigration society. Pointing to a recent reform of the German ‘option model’ of citizenship, he acknowledged dual citizenship as an “expression of the lived experience of a growing number of people”. The ceremony was at the same time a celebration of the 65th Constitutional Anniversary.
One day later in the Bundestag German-Iranian author Navid Kermani also addressed the issue of German immigration. In his Anniversary speech he made a conciliatory move by combining his lament over insufficient recognition of guest-workers’ merits in the past with a vicarious expression of immigrants’ gratitude for the German provision of freedom.
In the eve of the elections for European Parliament, the UN High Commissioner for the Refugees called for attention to the nearly half a million stateless persons living in Europe who live under the radar and are denied some of Read More …
The right to vote has always been the central privilege of citizenship. Its extension to resident migrants holds a promise of democratizing citizenship by bringing it closer to principles with deep roots in liberal and republican traditions, and further away Read More …
In the last decade, researchers have developed many innovative ideas for the construction of indices measuring immigration policies. Methodological considerations have, however, been largely absent from the discussion. To close this gap, this paper investigates the characteristics of existing indices Read More …
Debates concerning the ‘democratic deficit’ have been a prevalent feature of the normative literature on the European Union, but rather less attention has been paid to ‘demos problems’ constructed by the normative ordering of the EU and what such problems Read More …
The UK Parliament adopted the controversial amendment granting new powers to the Home Secretary to withdraw British citizenship when she has “reasonable grounds for believing” that the person has acted in a way “seriously prejudicial to the vital interests” of Read More …
A bill is pending in the Canadian parliament which would restrict the access to citizenship. It will also empower the government to withdraw citizenship of persons suspected in terrorist activities and shield such decisions from effective judicial review. Unlike a Read More …
