FREE MOVEMENT OF WORKERS : ECJ BOLSTERS RESIDENCE RIGHTS OF NON-EU NATIONALS.

A Chinese pensioner who has applied to reside in the EU by virtue of her family links to an EU national does not have to have a residence permit before arriving in the EU, the European Court of Justice has found. The fact that the woman only had a 90-day Swedish visa when she applied should not disbar her from being granted residency, the 9 January preliminary ruling said (Case C-1/05). The plaintiff only needs to prove her financial dependency on her German daughter-in-law by "any appropriate means" for her application to be valid, the Court ruled.

CHINESE PENSIONER

Yunying Jia, a retired Chinese national, came to Sweden in May 2003 to join her son, Shenzhi Li, and his wife, Svanja Schellehn, a German national working in Sweden with self-employed status. Before Jia's visa expired, she applied for a long-term residence permit but the Swedish authorities rejected it on the grounds that there was not enough proof of financial dependency. Jia had argued that her Chinese pension (128.17 a month) was insufficient to live on. Her husband, Yupi Li, lodged a similar application for residency in early 2004, although the ECJ has only dealt with Jia's case.

The Alien Appeals Board in Sweden sought guidance on whether Jia needed more than just a visa to be eligible to apply for full residency and on what precisely dependency' means. It asked whether the findings provided by the ECJ in a similar previous case (Akrich, C-109/01) could be transposed onto this case. On that occasion the plaintiff, Mr Akrich, got himself deported from the United Kingdom to Ireland...