Schools may be especially promising avenues, argue Tommaso Colombo and Jos Philips, to motivate individual EU citizens to act as needed for realising a central EU ideal: the ideal of a Union where fundamental rights are guaranteed, not only those of EU citizens, but also those of non-EU citizens.
Tommaso Colombo and Jos Philips, University of Utrecht
In an earlier blog post, we argued in favour of a right-based reconstruction of the EU ideal to guarantee fundamental rights. According to this reconstruction, the EU has moral reasons to guarantee the fundamental rights also of non-EU citizens, among whom non-EU citizens who are fleeing their homes. However, can this ideal be realised? As will soon become clear, a direct answer to this question is not the purpose of this post. Rather, our purpose is to suggest that schools could play a role in realising this ideal within the Union, and that, thus, further research should be pursued in that direction. In this blog post, we will focus both on non-EU citizens whose habitual residence is outside the EU and on non-EU citizens who live within the EU’s borders (meaning to leave it open whether they have the citizenship of a non-EU state or are stateless). We are primarily thinking of non-EU citizens in need, and not so much of, for example, affluent immigrant communities; but the points we make are applicable to all non-EU citizens.
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