Petition · past parliament
Give EU citizens in the UK a referendum vote, not just Irish, Maltese, Cypriots.
Rejected
21 signatures
What the petition asks
The current EU referendum planned for June 23rd 2016 restricts the right to vote to of EU-citizens to EU-citizens with Maltese, Irish or Cypriot nationality. This is a discriminatory arbitrariness only based on British colonian history and a violation of EU treaties on non-discrimination.
What this petition questions is not the sovereign right of the UK to restrict the referendum voting right to UK citizens, but the arbitrary discrimination between those EU citizens that are former colonials and those that are not. This is a discriminatory choice based only upon a coincidental fact of British Colonial History. For some things this may be an irrelevant issue, but the EU referendum potentially affects the citizenship status of all non-british EU citizens in the same way.
Why it was rejected
There was already a petition about this issue. Duplicates are rejected so signatures collect in one place.
Timeline
| 20 Feb 2016 | Petition opened for signatures |
| 22 Feb 2016 | Rejected by the Petitions Committee |
Key facts
Signatures
21
Status
Rejected
Rejected
22 Feb 2016
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Source: the official petition page. Last checked 15 Jul 2026.