For Your Personal Brexit Preparations: Which EU Countries Allow Dual Citizenship?

While I hope Brexit will be stopped, I'm expecting and preparing for the worst. So, with only two months before the EU approval process would need to start and Brexidiots in charge on the UK side, I'm expecting the UK to 'crash out' on 29 March 2019, without agreeing the terms of withdrawal (let alone any deal on future trade).

As a self-employed lawyer, there's both the professional and personal angles to consider.

Professionally, my UK legal qualifications will no longer be recognised in the EEA. So, I need to get qualified in an EEA state in order to continue credibly advising my UK clients on their EEA business activities, and advise my EEA clients on their UK activities. The only realistic option is adding an Irish legal practising certificate and consulting through an Irish law firm. Ireland will be the only truly common law jurisdiction left in the EEA, as both Malta and Cyprus have a mix of civil and common law, and it's laws are still very similar to the law in England and Wales.

That rather costly process is well underway, as previously explained.  

But that doesn't mean I personally have the right to live in Ireland, of course. So the question remains whether I could replace my UK right to live and work anywhere in the EEA by means of citizenship in the remaining 27 EU member states or one of the 3 EEA member state (Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein) - without losing my UK and Australian passports? 

As the EU Parliament research reveals, there are differing national approaches to being or becoming a citizen of the various EU member states. But the key issue is whether your favoured country allows you to retain your UK (or other) citizenship. For instance, the following countries would require you to give up your UK citizenship in order to become a citizen there:

• Austria 
• Bulgaria 
• Croatia 
• Czech Republic
• Denmark 
• Estonia 
• Germany
• Latvia 
• Lithuania 
• Netherlands 
• Slovenia 
• Spain

So there goes any chance of moving to, say, Barcelona or Mallorca without first becoming a citizen elsewhere in the EEA.

Unfortunately, given the dual nationality of my spouse and children, of the 3 additional EEA countries, only Norway requires you to renounce your other citizenship(s) if you wish to become a citizen there (i.e. rather than automatically having it by birth etc) -  although a change in the law has just been submitted to the Norwegian parliament. 

Otherwise, the options are as follows (excluding those where the EU research says you can still later lose your citizenship by living somewhere else):

• Belgium
• Cyprus 
• Finland 
• France 
• Greece 
• Hungary 
• Ireland 
• Italy 
• Luxembourg 
• Malta 
• Poland 
• Portugal 
• Romania 
• Slovakia 
• Sweden

and 

• Iceland
• Liechtenstein 

Remember, any port in a storm...

Brexit Britain Has Plenty of Adolf von Kleists But No Hernando Cruz

In his short novel, Galápagos, Kurt Vonnegut looked back a million years from 1986 on the extinction of the human race as we know it, tracing the plight of the passengers and crew on an environmental tour to the famous islands, billed "The Nature Cruise of the Century". Half way through, Vonnegut describes the critical moment when the highly experienced Hernando Cruz, having supervised the delivery and outfitting of the doomed Bahía de Darwin, suddenly abandons the cruise to save his family, leaving the final voyage in the hands of the ignorant, incompetent buffoon, Adolf von Kleist:

"If 'the Nature Cruise of the Century' had come off as planned, the division of duties between the Captain and his first mate would have been typical of the management of so many organizations a million years ago, with the nominal leader specializing in sociable balderdash, and with the supposed second-in-command burdened with the responsibility of understanding how things really worked, and what was really going on.

The best-run nations commonly had such symbiotic pairings at the top. And when I think about the suicidal mistakes nations used to make in olden times, I see that those polities were trying to get along with just an Adolf von Kleist at the top, without an Hernando Curz. Too late, the surviving inhabitants of such a nation would crawl from the ruins of their own creation and realize that, throughout all their self-imposed agony, there had been absolutely nobody at the top who had understood how things really worked, what it as all about, what was really going on."

Sound familiar?

Where Will You Be On 30 March?

You might be hoping for an end to Brexidiocy, but unless you've been hiding under a rock, you'll be expecting that the UK will leave the EU without agreeing how to do so in an orderly fashion. 

That means EU trade terms will cease to apply in 8 months' time, as of 30 March.

The European Commission is more advanced in its preparations for Brexit, as the remaining 27 member states ('the EU27') will expect officials to enforce the UK's exclusion from the EU trade bloc and the European Economic Area (the EU, plus Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland). 

The EU says there are 7 possible steps everyone might need to take, regardless of where they live. The EU has also published its Brexit preparations, including certain "preparedness notices" as well as legislation and other activities, like risk management.

My own preparations involve adding a legal practising certificate for Ireland and signing up with an Irish law firm to keep advising my clients on their EU-facing operations and the EU aspects of cross-border data protection issues. That's step 3 on the EU's top tips for Brexit.

Given that the UK government is planning on the basis of shortages in food and medicine, I'm also inclined to recommend that the family takes advantage of my wife's dual citizenship to relocate for a month or two until things settle down, if indeed they ever really do.

But I think we'll end up toughing it out in London, where I hope the evidence of the UK's continuing decline will be gradual, rather like when the Romans left Britain 1600 years ago. Over the next 40 to 60 years money will cease to circulate widely and the bulk of the population will abandon stone and concrete buildings for wooden huts and tents before they largely succumb to famine and disease...

Inevitably, however, another batch of Europeans will eventually arrive, attracted to the underpopulated wasteland on their frontier. Perhaps they'll bring wine, pasta, hair pins and exotic perfumes, a method for conveying water over long distances and sponges for toiletry use...

Then the whole, sorry cycle will repeat itself, post nauseam.

If You Need Consent To Process My Personal Data, The Answer Is No

... there are plenty of reasons for businesses and public sector bodies to process the data they hold about you, without needing your consent. These are where the processing is necessary for:

• performing a contract with you, or to take steps at your request before agreeing a contract; 
• complying with their own legal obligation(s); 
• protecting yours or another person's vital interests (to save your life, basically);
• performing a task in the public interest or in the exercise of their official authority; 
• their 'legitimate interests' (or someone else's), except where those interests are overridden by your legitimate interests or your fundamental rights which require protection of personal data. 

The General Data Protection Regulation lists other non-consent grounds apply where your personal data is more sensitive: relating to criminal convictions and offences or related security measures; or where it reveals racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership; or it is genetic or biometric data for the purpose of identifying only you; or data concerning health or your sex life or sexual orientation. National parliaments can add other grounds in local laws.

These non-consent grounds for processing are all pretty reasonable - and fairly broad. So, if you don't have the right to process my personal data on one of those grounds, why would I want you doing so?

This would seem to herald a new era in which the Big Data behavioural profiling/targeting/advertising model begins to decline, in favour of personal Apps (or open data spiders) that act as your agent and go looking for items in retailers' systems as you need it, without giving away your personal data unless or until it is necessary to do so...

Brexit, Syria and The Political Opportunity Donut

There are many ways to draw the political spectrum, but most of the time we talk about "Left" and "Right" as an endless series of tiny but increasing differences stretching in both directions - a political continuum. 

And most of the time that works - especially for "Yes"/"No" issues - since voters' views will be similarly grouped. There's not much pressure on the tiny differences or cracks among the political views on each 'side'.

Then something very complex and uncertain comes along - like Brexit or the latest chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government on 'rebels' as well as its own citizens that highlights all the problems in the Middle East in one hit. 

Suddenly those on the "Far Left", like Jeremy Corbyn, find themselves sitting cheek by jowl with those on the "Far Right", like Jacob Rees-Mogg or Nick Griffin. 

The longer these situations last, the greater the pressure on the usually tiny cracks between politicians and voters on each side. 

And as the pressure increases, those tiny cracks widen to the point that politicians begin to worry about which way they might need to leap for their political survival...

Hardliners toughen their stance, looking for ever more extreme views to hold. This rams home to the more moderate politicians just how far from the centre they've drifted, and causes them to look for ways to move back that way.  So, for example, you have growing numbers of Brexit 'rebels' in both the Labour and Tory parties, with the Liberal Democrats offering to scuttle Brexit altogether...

Here's what a former master of centrist politics, Tony Blair, said today:

"If you leave that vast, uncultivated centre ground,

someone is going to come along and cultivate it."

In other words, don't ignore the other side of the donut.