Jon Henley and the team look at where both UK citizens abroad and EU citizens in the UK stand and what is likely to happen now that we are a year away from Brexit

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This week marks a year to the date Britain is due to leave the European Union, and we thought we would return to a subject that we last visited about a year ago, back in the early days of Brexit Means – a subject that brings the reality of Brexit home like no other, actually, because it is about individual people and their lives: citizens’ rights.

It is also a subject on which – on the face of it, and if you believe the politicians, which is perhaps never an infallibly good idea – a great deal of progress has been made in the Brexit talks so far. The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, for example, wrote to EU27 leaders ahead of their Brussels summit just last week to say that EU citizens would be “fully protected from the consequences of Brexit”. Theresa May has written personally to EU nationals in the UK to say Britain is “honouring its pledge” to preserve their rights, while the Brexit secretary, David Davis, has said the draft article 50 divorce agreement and the deal reached on a transition period go a long way to giving “the greatest possible legal certainty about their future” to EU citizens in Britain and British nationals on the continent.

Joining Jon Henley to figure out the where citizens’ rights now stand are Nicolas Hatton of the 3Million, which represents EU citizens in the UK, and Jane Golding, chair of the campaign group British in Europe. Together they speak for about 4.6 million people, all of whom risk being more or less directly affected by aspects of Brexit, and Lisa O’Carroll, the Guardian’s Brexit correspondent, who has done such a lot to cover the concerns of EU citizens in Britain and UK nationals abroad.

