Gerard-René de Groot

Citizenship Attribution in Western Europe: International Framework and Domestic Trends

This special issue of JEMS deals with the challenges of migration for citizenship attribution in Western Europe. In this introductory paper we analyse recent developments in citizenship attribution across Western Europe over the past 25 years. Despite the contradictory impact of the instrumentalisation and politicisation of citizenship policies, and the fact that countries have different citizenship traditions and migration experiences, we observe six broad trends. These relate to the descent-based transmission of citizenship by women, men and emigrants; ius soli provisions for second- and third-generation immigrants; the acceptance of multiple citizenship; the introduction of language and integration requirements for naturalisation; the avoidance of statelessness; and the increasing relevance of EU membership. We describe the background and core features of each of these six trends and provide empirical examples from citizenship policies in 18 West European countries since the early 1980s.

Bilingual and Multilingual Legal Dictionaries in the European Union: An Updated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography is intended to shed light on the availability and distribution of legal dictionaries that translate the twenty-seven European languages. The representative corpus consists of about 200 printed bilingual legal dictionaries (BLDs) with terms from two or more legal languages used in the European Union. This bibliography aims to illustrate the wide variation in the quality of these BLDs by the usage of three special headings and by referring to relevant professional reviews. In addition, the authors have commented upon noticeable BLDs that deserve serious criticism or special attention. This annotated bibliography updates the previous bibliography (Gerard-René de Groot & Conrad J. P. van Laer. The Quality of Legal Dictionaries: An Assessment [Maastricht Faculty of Law Working Paper No. 2008/6, 2008]) and covers almost all recently published BLDs. However, this bibliography is not exhaustive because of the dispersion of publishing houses: Each publisher issues only two BLDs, on average.This annotated bibliography is intended to shed light on the availability and distribution of legal dictionaries that translate the twenty-seven European languages. The representative corpus consists of about 200 printed bilingual legal dictionaries (BLDs) with terms from two or more legal languages used in the European Union. This bibliography aims to illustrate the wide variation in the quality of these BLDs by the usage of three special headings and by referring to relevant professional reviews. In addition, the authors have commented upon noticeable BLDs that deserve serious criticism or special attention. This annotated bibliography updates the previous bibliography (Gerard-Rene de Groot & Conrad J. P. van Laer. The Quality of Legal Dictionaries: An Assessment [Maastricht Faculty of Law Working Paper No. 2008/6, 2008]) and covers almost all recently published BLDs. However, this bibliography is not exhaustive because of the dispersion of publishing houses: Each publisher issues only two BLDs, on average.

Benchmarking the protection against statelessness in Europe: comparative findings

This contribution presents the comparative findings of the ‘Protection against Statelessness Database’, developed by the European Union Democracy Observatory on Citizenship in collaboration with UNHCR. Using the most important international standards as a benchmark, the database provides a normative assessment of the extent to which citizenship laws in 36 European states provide sufficient protection against statelessness. While Section 2 explains the methodology developed by the Observatory in collaboration with UNHCR, and in particular the 17 ‘modes of protection against statelessness’ that have been devised, Section 3 draws some comparative conclusions. This is based on a fourfold distinction – that is, whether the countries provide more protection than required by the standards; act in line with the standards; provide a limited safeguard against statelessness; or provide no safeguard at all. Concluding that a serious attempt is generally made to avoid cases of statelessness from arising, the contribution also feels there is room for improvement.