The referendum result set in motion a complex array of political machinations that can feel hopelessly abstract, but one very simple outcome is this: Nearly 5 million people living in democracies across Europe were suddenly unsure of their rights. Most of these are people from elsewhere in Europe, legally residing in the U.K. for now but unsure whether they’ll get to stay. The same is true of a smaller number of British citizens who have made their homes across the Channel. And while a draft withdrawal agreement presented by U.K. and EU negotiators on Monday set out to clarify what some of these rights would look like after the U.K. fully transitions out of the EU at the end of 2020, plenty of unknowns remain. The3million, an advocacy group for citizens’ rights, said in a leaked letter to European Council President Donald Tusk that the draft agreement “makes for a bleak, uncertain future.” [...]
This uncertainty set Remigi on a fact-finding mission, which culminated in the June 2017 publication of In Limbo, a collection of testimonies of more than 100 EU nationals living in the U.K. between March and April 2017. The book includes the story of a Danish citizen who was denied permanent residency after living in the U.K. for 18 years due to an insurance requirement that many were unaware existed; an Italian couple who, despite being permanent residents in Oxford, are considering leaving the country due to a spike in hate crimes in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum; and a British national who is using her status as the granddaughter of German Jewish Holocaust refugees to apply for German citizenship in case her French partner’s permanent residency application is rejected. “The book has been written to show the human side of the Brexit story—the human cost,” Remigi said. “When you read these stories you realize the pain, the suffering … that our rights should have been guaranteed from the start.” [...]
Apart from negotiators in London and Brussels, there is one other body that could have a say: the European Court of Justice. Last month, an Amsterdam district court asked the EU high court to consider a case brought by five British nationals living in the Netherlands seeking to retain their EU citizenship after Brexit. Michaela Benson, a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London and the leader of BrExpats, a U.K. in a Changing Europe-funded research project focusing on the rights of British residents in EU, said that if the high court deems EU citizenship irremovable, it could have major implications for Britons everywhere. “If it’s successful, it won’t just be about U.K. nationals living in the EU,” she said. “It would be about all U.K. citizens who were, up until the point of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, considered EU nationals. … That could change the game.”
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