On Thursday 8 July, from 10.30 am to 12.30 pm, appointment with the mid-term meeting of the European project EUReKA, which, with a series of innovative initiatives, aims at promoting and facilitating the mobility of EU citizens within the Union. The meeting is organized by acli e.V. (Germany) in collaboration with the IDOS Studies and Research Center. The project involves also partners from Italy (ACLI Italy and Patronato ACLI, Fondazione Mondo Digitale, ANCI Lazio), Romania (Institutul European din Romania, Novapolis, Cartel ALFA), Croatia (Zagreb Grad), France and Portugal (Tandem Plus).
How to guarantee intra-EU mobility in a pandemic?
Back to the future! A European meeting
on free movement rights in times of Covid-19
Thursday, July 8 from 10.30 to 12.30
Live on the IDOS Youtube channel
There are more than 17 million European citizens on the move in Europe. They live in a Member State other than the one of which they have the citizenship, as a direct result of the free movement within the Union.
However, their civil and political rights, guaranteed by European citizenship, are not always fully recognized when they move to other Member States, and difficulties in participation and integration remain even for those who are legally part of the same supranational political entity.
In a politically divided and contradictory Europe, European citizens are becoming increasingly aware of the need to be represented, protected and connected, just as the record turnout in the 2019 European elections has shown.
The EU-funded Eureka project aims at supporting and facilitating the exercise of the rights of free movement, inclusion and participation of EU mobile citizens in the host Member States, through a mutual exchange of local, national and transnational capacity and skills, also based on an increased level of access to and use of digital information.
In particular, the project promotes a dissemination campaign to increase visibility and expand the knowledge and skills of EU mobile citizens, through the use of three new tools: a handbook entitled “EU Citizens go digital” on good practices and recommendations from field for each Member State; a unique, practical and easy-to-use web portal, called “Key for mobility”; and, above all, an APP linked to it, which allows at any time, from any mobile device, to find useful information and indications, thus representing a vademecum for EU mobile citizens.
These three digital media are valuable tools for exercising EU citizenship rights more fully and awareness-raising and for strengthening a sense of belonging to common values. Informed, aware and digitally literate citizens are more integrated and interconnected Europeans.
However, the current phase of opposition to Covid raises some important challenges regarding the movement of EU citizens within the Union: how to guarantee and protect the right to free mobility between Member States in times of differentiated restrictions due to the pandemic, vaccination campaign still ongoing and with the persistence of administrative and procedural discrepancies between each Member States? How to curb the risk of exploitation of EU migrants, given that since the beginning of the pandemic emergency intra-EU movement has been allowed mainly to seasonal workers and carers? And what legal issues will have to be addressed with the adoption of the green pass, which puts health protection in conflict with the European pillar of free movement?
These and other problematic issues will be addressed during the mid-term meeting of the Eureka project, in which, starting from the solicitations of some European main speakers, a dialogue will emerge in which comments and questions will be collected by a selected group of experts, journalists, practitioners from Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Romania. A unique event not to be missed, to return back together to the future of Europe.
