Dr Luke Dimitrios Spieker (Humboldt University) will give a DELI lunchtime seminar entitled "Trust, Solidarity, Democracy: Towards a republican Union citizenship after Commission v Malta?".

The CJEU’s decision in Commission v Malta marks the summit of a long-standing, highly controversial debate in European legal scholarship. Considering the Maltese practice of “golden passports” incompatible with EU law, the Court expands the reach of EU law deep into an area of national competences. The Grand Chamber establishes constraints for the conferral of the Member States’ nationalities and develops a shared concept of nationality based on a “special relationship of solidarity and good faith”. To justify this bold step, it mobilises constitutional principles: trust, solidarity, and democracy. Ultimately, it seems that the Court embraced a republican understanding of citizenship – one that builds on commitment and participation. 

In this seminar, we will explore these deep structures and unravel the future impact of this judgment on the status of Union citizenship.

In this paper, we present a working chapter of our forthcoming monograph, which examines the purpose of pregnancy protections in employment law frameworks. In this seminar, we focus our attention on EU labour law. We interrogate whether such protections are (or should be) a matter of occupational safety or non-discrimination. The examination of pregnancy protections includes a close reading of secondary EU law and CJEU jurisprudence on pregnancy discrimination and occupational safety for pregnant workers. 

Pertinently, we focus on the building of the pregnancy discrimination framework on the basis of sex discrimination, as the CJEU (and more recently the ECtHR) have declared that only women can be the subject of pregnancy discrimination, thus it is inherently tied to the female sex. We highlight the challenges this approach creates for non-binary and trans individuals, who can use ART to reproduce but may face workplace discrimination due to falling outside of the gender discrimination rubric created by the regional Courts. 

While existing non-discrimination protections are problematic for this reason, utilising non-discrimination is important for recognising how pregnant people can be treated differently even where occupational safety is not at issue. Therefore, we posit that we should consider how non-discrimination on the grounds of pregnancy can be framed more inclusively.