LUXEMBOURG (CN) — As Northern Ireland belongs to the United Kingdom, it can withhold government assistance from a Dutch-Croatian woman with U.K. residency but not U.K. citizenship, the European Court of Justice ruled Thursday.
The woman at the center of the case, identified as CG in court documents, was unemployed and living in a women’s shelter with her two young children. “Such a person is likely to become an unreasonable burden on the social assistance system of the United Kingdom and cannot therefore rely on the principle of non-discrimination," the Luxembourg-based court found.
CG brought the case after she was denied universal credit, a government payment for people over 18 but under retirement age who are out of work and on a low income. She moved to Northern Ireland with her Dutch husband but left the relationship due to domestic violence.
The Department for Communities, the office which administers social assistance programs, denied her request based on her lack of British nationality. Northern Ireland is politically separate from the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state.
CG had been granted pre-settled status in the United Kingdom under the EU Settlement Scheme, the process by which EU citizens living in the U.K. prior to Brexit could remain after leaving the union. Some 2.25 million EU nationals are living in the U.K. under this arrangement.
When it was a member of the EU, the U.K. was required to treat EU citizens the same as its own nationals. After Brexit, however, there is no longer a reciprocal right to live and work in the U.K. and EU. Both British citizens in the EU and EU citizens living in the U.K. have scrambled to sort out residency since the withdrawal. As she had relocated legally, prior to the U.K.’s withdraw, the court ruled Thursday that CG has a right to live in “dignified conditions.”
It was the Appeal Tribunal in Northern Ireland that referred the case to the EU's highest court. Before it took up the matter, an EU magistrate weighed in last month with a nonbinding opinion that EU non-nationals couldn’t automatically be blocked from receiving social assistance, but that the cases needed to be examined on an individual basis. The 17-judge panel agreed, writing: “The financial situation of each person concerned should be examined specifically, without taking account of the social benefits claimed, in order to determine whether he or she meets the condition of having sufficient resources.”
The United Kingdom voted by referendum to leave the European Union in 2016 and the negotiated transition period ended on December 31, 2020. The court still held jurisdiction in this case because the woman made her claim before the transition period was over.
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