EU citizenship: Still a Fundamental Status? 9 sphere of immigration and family reunion. It is well established that it is a matter for the member states to decide who may acquire their citizenship, thus making the member states the gatekeepers of access to EU citizenship, although from early on the CJEU has made it clear that member states may not refuse to recognise an ‘EU citizenship’. In Micheletti,13 for example, Spain could not choose to treat a dual Italian/Argentinian national as simply Argentinian for the purposes of access to the territory or to benefits associated with presence on the territory. This is an early example of the CJEU requiring such national competences around nationality and the recognition of nationality to be exercised, in situations covered by European Union law, in a manner that has due regard to the requirements of EU law. The ‘situations covered by EU law’ have included the type of scenario that arose in the case of Rottmann,14 where the applicant had moved from Austria to Germany, and had obtained German citizenship by fraud, failing to inform the authorities that he was the subject of possible criminal proceedings in Austria. The reversal of the naturalisation decision by the state authorities in the case of Rottmann fell within the scope of EU law because of that mobility, and thus Germany had to apply its withdrawal rules in a manner that had regard to the impact of the withdrawal on Rottmann’s status as an EU citizen and the loss of rights that would flow from this. By becoming German, Rottmann had lost his Austrian citizenship by operation of law. Thus depriving him of German citizenship left him, at least for the time being, stateless. The CJEU made it clear that measures withdrawing citizenship and depriving a person of their EU citizenship needed to be capable of judicial review at the national level and they needed to be proportionate, in order to comply with the requirements of EU law. In drawing this conclusion, the Court referenced the early case of Grzelczyk where it stated that citizenship of the Union is intended to be the fundamental status of nationals of the member states.15 In general, though, the Court indicated that withdrawal of citizenship on grounds of fraud during the process of n­ aturalisation expresses a legitimate state interest. It declined to rule on the question of what, if any, measures Austria should take if Rottmann sought to recover his original nationality. Rottmann is the only case thus far where a CJEU ruling has intruded directly into the field of citizenship law, although pending before the Court is the Tjebbes case on the effects of Dutch rules which deprive persons, by 13 14 15 Case C-369/90 ECLI:EU:C:1992:295. Case C-135/08 ECLI:EU:C:2010:104. Case C-184/99 ECLI:EU:C:2001:458, para. 31.