Third-country national students seeking to study in the EU with special emphasis on Indian students : conditions, rights and possibilities

CARIM-India: Developing a knowledge base for policymaking on India-EU migrationThis paper proposes to examine the conditions, rights and possibilities of third-country national students, and in particular Indian students, seeking to study in one of the EU Member States from the perspective of the EU legal migration regime. It will be argued that current Directive 2004/114 provides such students with an important set of rights (such as, arguably, a right of entry and residence upon fulfilment of the conditions therefore and a right to work during the studies) but also contains a set of regrettable limitations (such as the lack of provision for students to work in the host country after his or her studies and the restrictive conditions attached to their intra-EU student mobility). Some of these limitations can, however, be overcome by special categories of TCN students relying on a culmination of rights from different sources, in particular agreements concluded by their country of origin with the EU (such as eg. the EEC – Turkey agreement). As such, a number of case studies of such special TCN students are conducted in order to illustrate the possibilities that Indian students may have under their own pending EU-India Trade agreement.CARIM-India is co-financed by the European University Institute and the European Unio