ABSTRACT
Ever since The Origins of Totalitarianism, it has been commonplace to note that rights are dependent on the existence of a political community, a nation state, and that belonging to such a community may be identified with possession of citizenship.2 Jacqueline Bhabha, a distinguished human rights scholar and children’s rights advocate, coined the term ‘Arendt’s children’ to describe and draw attention to the situation shared by a large number of children in today’s world who are or risk being separated from their parents or carers and whose ties to any state are so weak that they do not, in practice, have ‘a country to call their own’.3 This chapter turns to one specific issue relating to ‘Arendt’s children’, that of their transnational family ties and rights to family life.4 More precisely, the issue under scrutiny is the assessment of the best interests of the child in the particular context of EU citizenship and immigrant family reunification.
