'EU Citizenship and Social Rights, a Comparative Report’, D6.2 Report: Report on the transposition of the relevant EU instruments in the Member States, bEUcitizen

Abstract

This report is an analysis of national reports on Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Sweden and Spain on the access of EU citizens to social rights. The social rights studied here are subsistence benefits, housing benefits, education grants and housing benefits . Especially these rights are vulnerable in case of economically non -active EU nationals; on the other hand exclusion from these rights may lead to serious poverty. Hence a very important area. We found that in case law of the Court of Justice and in the C itizenship Directive criteria are developed to give non -economically active persons only after they have established a degree of integration into a Member State access to social rights. This is a very interesting development of EU citizenship, that both pr otects social systems and does not exclude EU citizens on ground of their nationality. It is also a difference approach then in case of, for instance, political rights for EU nationals, where equal treatment is not reached to the extent that after five yea rs one can vote for the national parliament of the host country. We then investigated the ways in which countries have traditionally developed conditions on the degree of integration and how these still influence the reaction of the system to mobile EU cit izens. We found that elements as the criteria for residency, the conditions on registering and the financing of the systems vary considerably between the countries. Some systems have more problems with EU law and react differently to this than others. Wher e for some countries influx of patients means an increased market, for others it is a serious threat. By then further protecting the system legal certainty and transparency are diminishing for both workers and EU citizens where no permanent solution is in sight. This study therefore makes the analysis that there are several ways to design a social rights system and that some seem to create fewer problems than others while still having more legal certainty for the EU citizen. In scenarios the possibilities for Member States, both the host States and the States of origin, and also that of the European Commission are sketched to reconcile EU citizenship with national systems and thus to create more legal certainty.