While European Union citizenship gradually moved from a matter of employment rights towards a matter of fundamental rights (Jeffery, 2001), the status of third-country nationals remained locked in the realms of national security and economic cooperation. In 1996, the European Council issued a resolution on the need to establish a common legal framework for third-country nationals who are long-term residents in the European Union. The aim of the Directive eventually approved in 2003 was twofold: to create a single status of long-term resident for third country nationals across member states, attached to a common set of requirements and rights; and to define to what extent such status is ‘transferable’ in case a long-term resident migrates from a member state to another. In the following years, this Directive would be transposed into national law. According to the Treaty of the European Community (art. 249), Directives are binding “as to the result to be achieved”, forms and methods being left for national authorities to define. Law-making regarding migration at both the European Union and national levels has been widely discussed, but less attention has been paid into the process of transposition (Schibel, 2005). The goal of this paper is to assess the transposition of the Directive 2003/109/EC on the status of third-country nationals who are long-term residents and its transposition into national law in Portugal. It starts by providing a selective overview of the directive, with an emphasis on the balance between protective advancements for migrants and cautious provisions. The second section discusses the particularities of migration issues in Portugal and the transposition of this specific directive. Last, some conclusions are drawn. The suggestion is that this directive is not a simple effort of approximation of rights; it is also the result of a bargaining process between such approximation and the relative advantage of European Union citizens. To a large extent, this corroborates the little capability of the open method of coordination regarding migration issues (Urth, 2005; Velluti, 2007).
