Offbeat | UK citizens ask Dutch court to protect post-Brexit EU rights

A group of British citizens who live in the Netherlands went to a Dutch court this week in a bid to retain their EU citizenship rights after Britain completes its divorce from the bloc, but lawyers for the Dutch state dismissed their case as a legal fiction.

In a case that could have far-reaching consequences for some 1 million Britons currently living in European Union countries outside the United Kingdom, lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm launched summary proceedings before a judge at Amsterdam District Court, asking judge Floris Bakels to put so-called “prejudicial questions” about the status of U.K. nationals post-Brexit to the European Court of Justice, the Luxembourg-based court that rules on EU law.

According to the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, any person who is a citizen of an EU nation automatically is also an EU citizen. EU citizenship grants rights including to move and live freely within the bloc.

Brexit negotiators have made progress on the protection of rights of EU citizens living in Britain and U.K. citizens living on the continent, but no full agreement has been reached yet on the issue and lawyers for the plaintiffs said the progress so far left their fate up in the air.

British lawyer Jolyon Maugham, who is funding the case, said that if the Dutch judge puts questions to the Luxembourg court, “The answer the Court of Justice gives will be an answer that applies to U.K. passport holders wherever they live.”