ABSTRACT

While the European integration project is facing new challenges, abandonments and criticism, it is often forgotten that there are powerful legal instruments that allow citizens to protect and extend their rights. These instruments and the actions taken to activate them are often overlooked and deliberately ignored in the mainstream debates.

This book presents a selection of cases in which legal institutions, social movements, avant-gardes and minorities have tried, and often succeeded, to enhance the current state of human rights through traditional as well as innovative actions. The chapters of this book investigate some of the cases in which the gap between the conventionally recognized rights and those advocated is becoming wider and where traditionally disadvantaged groups raise new problems or new issues are emerging concerning individual freedom, transparency and accountability, which are not yet properly addressed in the current political and legal landscape. Can political institutions and courts without coercive power of last resort actually foster more progressive rights? This book suggests that the expansion of human rights might be a viable strategy to generate a proper European citizenship.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Studies, Politics and International Relations, Law and Society, Sociology and Migration Studies and more broadly to NGOs and policy advisers.

part |25 pages

In search of European citizenship

chapter 1|15 pages

Introduction

Claiming citizenship rights in Europe

chapter 2|10 pages

European citizenship in times of crisis

What is left?

part I|51 pages

The refugee’s challenge to European citizenship

chapter 4|15 pages

Refugees traversing borders

Disobedience as an act of European citizenship

part II|89 pages

European citizens at the fringe

chapter 6|21 pages

Prisoner voting rights on a European perspective

The cases of McHugh & others v. The United Kingdom and Thierry Delvigne v. Commune de Lesparre Médoc

chapter 9|18 pages

Sterilisation without informed consent

How to improve European citizens’ medical agency

chapter 10|20 pages

Parallel claims for the human right to water

The case of Roma in Slovenia

part III|54 pages

Emerging issues and political subjects

chapter 11|17 pages

The “right to be forgotten”

Asserting control over our digital identity or rewriting history?

part |12 pages

Epilogue