Wolf Legal Publishers has published «The Charter and the Court of Justice of the European Union: Notable Cases from 2016-2018». This collection contains annotated judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union from the period 2016-2018, commenting on landmark cases in which the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union was central to the dictum of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Click this link to download a preview of this book in PDF format.
Avv. Marco Mazzeschi and our Senior Legal Consultant – Yuu Shibata were invited to contribute a chapter in the book – «X and X v État Belge: a Dead End for a Humanitarian Visa in the EU?». Please find below a preview of the contents in this chapter:
Chapter: X and X v État Belge: A Dead End for a Humanitarian Visa in the EU?
Index:
- Introduction
- Facts and the questions referred to the Court
- Legal reasoning of the ECJ and the Opinion of the Advocate General
- Legal and Political issues behind the humanitarian visa
- Consequences of Judgment C-638/16 PPU on the issuance of the humanitarian visa
- X and X v État Belge and the European Court of Human Rights
- Conclusions
Introduction:
This time we focused on the Judgment C-638/16 PPU. This case concerned a Syrian family living in Aleppo. They submitted to the Belgian Embassy in Beirut an application for a visa with limited territorial validity, yet their petition was rejected by the Belgian immigration authorities. The applicants challenged these decisions and in these circumstances, the referring court decided to refer the case to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling. This case represented a great opportunity for the ECJ to clarify expressly that when a Member State implements EU law, adopting a decision in relation to an application for a visa with limited territorial validity, this Member State should be required to ensure that the rights guaranteed by the Charter are respected. Yet, the ECJ did not provide much explanation/clarification on this aspect, limiting itself with simple reasoning that this case falls outside the scope of EU law, and therefore, falling solely within the scope of national law. In this way, the ECJ drastically closed the possibility to open a new pathway (at EU level) to asylum seekers looking for international protection. In this comment, it will be scrutinized the legal reasoning made by the ECJ and the Advocate General in his Opinion, focusing on the application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union with the ultimate goal to better understand the Union’s positions towards the issuance of the visa with limited territorial validity on “humanitarian grounds” and its actual applicability.
This book can be purchased at your bookshop, or by contacting the Wolf Legal publisher directly via email.
Contributors: Marco Mazzechi & Yuu Shibata
