The Development of the EU Non-Discrimination Regime

Abstract

In Chapter 1 the development of the EU non-discrimination regime is introduced, first in terms of legal developments. It recapitulates the steps starting from the founding Treaties, which only dealt with discrimination on the grounds of nationality and gender, up until the Treaty of Amsterdam, introducing the competence for the discrimination grounds of racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, age, disability, and sexual orientation, and the adoption of the two Directives which are the focus of the book: Directive 2000/43/EC and Directive 2000/78/EC. It also points at financial instruments and institutions set up in parallel to support the implementation of these Directives and the recent adoption of a series of Strategic Documents and Action Plans in the Commission’s attempts to achieve a Union of equality. The second sub-chapter then discusses the shift from non-discrimination to substantive equality on the basis of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and closes with some considerations regarding the different levels of impact of EU anti-discrimination law in national constitutional systems.