Statelessness Working Paper Series 2016/03 to refer to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, there are positive prospects for the protection of individual human rights, and this would probably involve statelessness issues.38 Interestingly, the European Commission has already considered such future developments and funds research projects on EU citizenship. The Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme 2014-2020 aims at promoting non-discrimination and the rights deriving from Union citizenship.39 Another example is the Involuntary Loss of European Citizenship (ILEC) project that researches the effects of the increasing judicialisation of the grounds of loss of Union citizenship over national legal systems.40 In 2013, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) released an opinion calling for the extension of EU citizenship to long-term residents as a way to facilitate integration of immigrants and refugees in the EU. This would concern the third-country nationals in Europe, but also the EU’s stateless residents who continue to be excluded from both the rights attached to nationality as well as those enjoyed by EU citizens.41 However, if the concept of EU citizenship seems to develop along the path of increasing guarantees for EU citizens, it is not always the case in practice. In recent years, France, Italy and other EU member states discriminatorily expelled Roma from their national territories, including Romanian and Bulgarian individuals who were therefore EU citizens. 42 As Claude Cahn notes “[a]pparently, the nascent EU citizenship is still weak, and citizenship of Roma is shown to be of a lesser status than that of other Europeans”.43 Once again, policies to reduce Romani statelessness as well as other Roma’s hardship will not have any results if they are not accompanied by strong actions and willingness to combat discrimination. 4. Various proposals to solve the issue of Romani Statelessness within the EU Jessica Parra presents the idea of allowing individuals to become EU citizens with or without a MS nationality, somewhat similarly to the claims for a stateless Romani nation. Thus, stateless persons could bypass the obstacles to acquiring MS citizenship and accede directly EU citizenship and the benefits attached to it. 44 Yet, as seen supra, EU Citizenship “shall be additional to national citizenship and shall not replace it.” In fact, such a radical measure would constitute more than a simple EU law reform, it would probably transform the whole functioning of EU institutions. Transferring all citizenship prerogatives to the EU supranational level would also imply changing the entire framework, which could go as far as adopting a Constitution and transforming the Union into one European Federal State.45 One can never know if this will occur in the future, but taking into account the European crisis context it is rather unlikely to happen within the next decade. 38 See for example CJEU joined cases C-411/10 and C-493/10, N. S. v Secretary of State for the Home Department and M. E. and Others v Refugee Applications Commissioner and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, 21 December 2011 39 See the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme’s website <http://ec.europa.eu/justice/grants1/programmes-2014-2020/rec/index_en.htm> accessed 1st March 2016 40 See ILEC website <www.ilecproject.eu/The%20Project> accessed 1 st March 2016 41 See the European Network on Statelessness at <www.statelessness.eu/blog/eu-citizenship-statelesspeople#sthash.UZKiFi3E.dpuf> accessed 1st March 2016 42 See notably Owen Parker, ‘Roma and the Politics of EU Citizenship in France: Everyday Security and Resistance’, in Journal of Common Market Studies, Volume 50, Issue 3, May 2012, pp 475–491 43 Claude Cahn, ‘Minorities, Citizenship and Statelessness in Europe’, European Journal of Migration and Law, 14, 2012, pp314-316 44 Jessica Parra, ‘Stateless Roma in the European Union: Reconciling the Doctrine of Sovereignty Concerning Nationality Laws with International Agreements to Reduce and Avoid Statelessness’, in Fordham International Law Journal, Volume 34, Issue 6, 2011, pp1685-1687 45 See the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre’s paper ‘What the EU Constitution does – A 14-point critical summary’, Dublin, March 2005 <www.europarl.europa.eu/inddem/docs/papers/14%20point%20summary.pdf> accessed 1st March 2016 5