Talking about the citizenship of the “minors” has immediately led to reflect on a fundamental difference in legal language, that between right to and right of. The “minor”, it has been said, (whatever the reason for this “minority”, as we have started during the Summer School from the basic reference to the “minor age”) is the holder of a right to not of a right of. In other words, the minor has the right to various forms of “protection”, ultimately enters into a complex system that constitutes the welfare state, and enters as a minor citizen with a qualitatively connoted and quantitatively reduced right of citizenship. The speech soon turns from juridical into a sociological one and the Marshallian tripartition of the rights of citizenship as political, social and civil rights is recalled.
From another point of view, however, it should be noted that this lowering of the right to in tha cage of a right of protection does not take into account the perspective drawn for example by Jellinek who invests the legal subjectivity of a fourfold level of citizenship: passive, negative, positive, active citizenship. What is interesting is that in this formulation the negative right (right of, liberties) has as its counterpart a positive right that is certainly not reduced to the request for protection but is exalted as a positive capacity of claim, almost a source of right for self .There seems to be no right of without right to. In other words if in the first conceptual framework the legal claim depends on being a “minor” citizen and is necessarily channeled into the rules established for that subject characterized by a minus of citizenship, in the second as a citizen (right to citizenship and not right of citizenship) the subject exercises his legal title by making claims that produce rights.
The same reflections on the relationship between right of and right to and for the realization of a “pure” juridical condition (we use this term so important in the philosophical-juridical tradition with full awareness of the need for its problematization) can be made considering the theme , exploded with the migration question, of the relationship never taken into consideration in its legal value between the right to mobility and the right of free circulation . The latter was one of the greatest achievements of the process of European unification, with its different phases and institutions. Yet the difficulty of supporting it became more and more evident as soon as its groundlessness was recognized, being in no way conceived as the realization of a more fundamental right to mobility. (Gabriella Valera, reflections on Summer School Citizenship of “minors”: rights, education, dialogue).
