Citizenship for Sale: Could and Should the EU Intervene? Jo Shaw On 15 January 2014, the European Parliament will debate1 the issue of ‘EU citizenship for sale’ as a ‘topical subject’ in its plenary. The Council and the Commission will both make statements on the issue, and the debate will be the culmination of a process whereby numerous parliamentarians from various political groups (ALDE, Verts/ALE, PPE – although not the S&D group of which the Maltese Labour Party currently in government is a member) have addressed questions to the Commission and the Council and expressed their concerns about the trend towards selling citizenship. Can such critiques rely on European law or should the case be argued politically? And if the latter, is the Commission or the European Parliament the right institution to take the lead? Dimitry Kochenov has made the point that there does not appear to be a case to argue that the decision by Malta to ‘sell’ its citizenship – whatever the price – raises an issue of EU law. It is well established that the conditions under which the Member States provide for the acquisition or loss of their citizenship are a matter to be decided by these states, provided that the rules put in place observe the requirements of EU law. The 1992 Micheletti judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU established that Member States must recognise the ‘EU part’ of a person’s dual citizenship, as to do otherwise would deprive that person of the benefit of the free movement rights. In its 2010 Rottmann decision, the Court acknowledged that decisions on the loss of citizenship, where these would entail the loss of EU citizenship and thus deprive the person concerned of their rights and duties under that status, should be subject to a test of proportionality. In Rottmann, Advocate General Maduro did suggest a broader basis in the norms of EU law for constraining the actions of the Member States. He referred specifically to the case of mass naturalisations of third country nationals by a Member State ­undertaken 1 European Parliament Resolution on the sale of EU citizenship, 2013/2995(RSP), available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ ficheprocedure.do?lang=en&reference=2013/2995%28RSP%29 © The Author(s) 2018 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating Transformations of National Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92719-0_13 61