R. Fernhout

An analysis of the Ben Alaya case (C-491/13). When conditions of the Students Directive are met, that directive confers entitlement to a student visa, without leaving the national authorities any discretion in that regard

Article 12 of Council Directive 2004/114/ec of 13 December 2004 on the conditions of admission of third-country nationals for the purposes of studies, pupil exchange, unremunerated training or voluntary service must be interpreted as meaning that the Member State concerned is obliged to admit to its territory a third-country national who wishes to stay for more than three months in that territory for study purposes, where that national meets the conditions for admission exhaustively listed in Articles 6 and 7 of that directive and provided that that Member State does not invoke against that person one of the grounds expressly listed by the directive as justification for refusing a residence permit. This case report is an elaborated version of my annotation under cjeu 10 September 2014, C-491/13 (Ben Alaya) in Jurisprudentie Vreemdelingenrecht 2014/345 (a Dutch case law journal on aliens law).