Pensions provide economic well-being for individuals who are no longer able or expected to work and earn an income due to old age. The right to a pension is a fundamental human right, explicitly mentioned as such in Article 50 of the Constitution. It is also included in various international legal instruments in the context of the right to social security as well as the right to private property. Historically, states have conditioned the right to a pension on the principle of territoriality. In a modern and highly global society the principle of territoriality no longer provides adequate protection of the right to a pension for migrant workers who work in several different states in the course of their career. Mechanisms for the integration of social security systems have been developed in EU law in order to effectively implement the freedom of movement for workers, which is one of the four fundamental freedoms of the EU internal market. The general regulation for the coordination of social security systems is Regulation (EU) 883/2004, which includes integration of statutory pension schemes and other statutory pension schemes. However, General Coordination Regulation does not interfere with the content of national pension systems, but only contains formal rules governing contact with foreign law (conflict-of-law rules). Each EU Member State therefore still retains the specific features of its own pension system, as the purpose of respective regulation is integration and not unification of national social security systems. Supplementary pension schemes are not included in the General Coordination Regulation. They are regulated by directives, which achieve partial harmonization of supplementary pension schemes through the setting of minimum standards. Yet the integration of supplementary pension schemes is extremely modest, covering only posted workers. In order to provide more flexibility in the supplementary pension market, Regulation (EU) 2019/1238, introducing the Pan-European Personal Pension Product, was adopted in 2019. It provides a specific supplementary individual pension insurance product that can be transferred from one Member State to another in the event of relocation.
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