Norway, Surinder Singh, family immigration rejection

[treena.oakley]

I'm currently waiting on an appeal from Norwegian immigration and was hoping I could suss out some advice from the collective experience of these forums.

TL;DR: I'm pretty sure Norway is breaking EEA law/obligations under the Directive by rejecting our application for family immigration pursuant to EEA/Directive, but they don't seem to care and Solvit won't help -- any advice?

Here's some background on the situation:

In 2012 my wife (Norwegian) moved to Sweden as a jobseeker; I (non-EU citizen) joined her a few days later (see Directive). After about 2 months, my wife was re-hired at her old job (in Norway), but we remained living in Sweden (so self-sufficient/cross-border worker). Important here was that my wife's address was in Sweden, she was legally resident/registered etc... After more than a year of living in Sweden we decided to return to Norway. We applied for family immigration in accordance with EEA regulations (Surinder Singh).

Norwegian immigration rejected our application because:
1. they were uncertain whether treaty rights were exercised while in the host member state (Sweden) because there was no economic activity in host member state, and;
2. they claimed our case was attempting to circumvent Norwegian National law; they did not consider our stay in host member state to be genuine. Their justification was based on a previous application for family immigration under Norwegian national law that had been rejected earlier; thus they believed we were trying to circumvent national law.

We filed an appeal and used CJEU case law/the directive to point out why their rejection was unfounded. We cited that my wife's right to enter Sweden as a jobseeker was upheld in CJEU ruling in Case C-292/89 (Antonissen), and that Article 7 of the directive along with CJEU Case 53/81 (Levin) state that exercising treaty rights is not contingent on gainful employment or economic activity in the Host Member State, so long as the conditions of the Directive are met. Additionally, CJEU case C-152/03 (Ritter-Coulais) states that exercising the right to free movement while working in the state of nationality is enough to constitute meeting treaty rights under Article 45 TFEU. We also indicated that CJEU Case C-456/12 (O.and B.) demonstrates that exercising treaty rights to receive the benefit of community law does not in itself constitute an abuse and that CJEU Case C-109/01 (Akrich) secured the rights to free movement to/from a Member State regardless of the reasons for moving in the first place.

Immigration stuck to their decision based on the two reasons above, and sent our case to a different appeals board (as is standard practice).

All that being said, we're not sure what to do now. We are still waiting on the second appeals board (the final option for us), but the appeals board has < 10% overturn rate so I'm not particularly hopeful that they will overturn immigration's decision, especially given Norway's failure to comply with these cases. In fact, a recent letter from the EFTA criticized a Circular (No AI-l/2014) as an infringement on EEA law and represents a violation of Norway's obligations under Article 7 of the Directive. This letter specifically discusses 4 areas Norway needs to comply with, two of which are the reasons UDI uses to justify their rejection of our application.

We contacted Solvit, but they said they don't deal with Norway. Is there another governing body we can contact, or is our only option to seek legal action? Are we missing something?

[ivn490]

i am not any expert but

ur wife is norwegian, she shudnt have any problem getting to norway, u being a legal resident in sweden dont need a visa to enter norway. once you are in, the norwegian immigrations offices have to do what they have to do as long as you have a valid marriage certificate from sweden or for that matter of fact, any country. i fear i dnt understand the issue in full detail.