With a sentence issued on 27 June 2006, the Court of Justice of the European Community rejected the appeal presented by the European Parliament on Directive 2003/86/CE of 22 September 2003 relating to the right of family reunification for citizens of third countries legitimately resident on the territory of member states. In particular, the Court confirmed that the Directive in question does not conflict with a series of guaranteed fundamental rights ( respect for family life, compliance with the principle of non-discrimination for reasons of age, respect for the obligation to take into consideration the higher interests of the child ). The provisions of the Directive regulate “the possibility for member states to examine whether a child over the age of 12, who arrives on the national territory separately from the rest of his/her family satisfies the prescribed criteria for family reunification”. The majority of MEPs had, on the contrary, pointed out that any delay in the granting to the minor in question of the right to join his/her own legally resident family would constitute a violation of the right to family reunification. The judges of the Curia Europaea motivated their sentence by affirming, on the one hand, that this discretional power of the national authorities is in any case “limited” and in any case “in line with the right to protect family life upheld by the European Convention of Human Rights” and confirmed by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and on the other that the age of 12 “corresponds to a stage in the life of a minor in which the child in question has already lived in a third country for a relatively long period of time without the members of his/her family”. This passage of the sentence has already been sharply criticized by those who believe that in this way the sufferings of the minor and his/her family for merely prejudicial reasons would be further prolonged. Lastly, the Court, in its sentence, also justified the provision that grants “power to the member states to postpone family reunification by two or three years” on the grounds that this would ensure that “the reunification takes place in good conditions, and once the person concerned has been resident in the host nation for a sufficiently long period to presume a permanent settlement and a sufficient level of integration”.
