Workshop – Beyond the mere enforcement of the Racial Equality and Employment Equality Directives by Romaniţa Iordache and Iustina Ionescu
Romaniţa Iordache is a Human Rights researcher and Iustina Ionescu a Human Rights lawyer, both from Romania. They are the authors of a thematic report that will be published in 2022 on promising practices in the effective enforcement of the Racial Equality and Employment Equality Directives.
This report aims to consider the encouraging and promising practices developed in relation to existing enforcement mechanisms for the system of protection against discrimination based on the Equality Directives, by also looking at remedies and, in particular, innovative solutions throughout the 27 Member States and the 3 EFTA countries.
In the workshop the authors presented the aims of their report; the definitions of ‘effective enforcement’ and ‘promising or encouraging practices’ they applied; the methodology of their research; their main conclusions and promising practices in unexpected places.
The main conclusions of this report – of a seemingly complex and colourful puzzle of measures and provisions to address discrimination across the European Union – are twofold: firstly, innovative, promising elements can be identified in every single Member State and secondly, even when such promising elements seem to be small and country-specific, all these elements taken together form the foundations of a potential giant leap at the European level, if the goodwill, exchange of good practices and inspiration prevail. A third conclusion is also apparent and more sobering: while in some Member States the initial impetus for adopting progressive anti-discrimination legislation leads to promising practices developed from a victim-based perspective, such positive elements cannot be taken for granted and need to be consistently used and championed, otherwise the risk of dilution and regress or of sham compliance is very real.
Video
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Thematic report Effectively enforcing the right to non-discrimination (1,37 MB)
