This online conference held on 19 November 2021 provided an opportunity for national equality bodies to discuss with relevant actors on how they can cooperate and better promote equality mainstreaming and use the tools of equality duties and equality impact assessments to tackle discrimination across the various protected fields and grounds.
Equality is a founding value of the European Union and part of the shared constitutional traditions of Member States. Moreover, the Union’s duty to ensure equality mainstreaming and combat discrimination is reflected in Articles 8 and 10 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU, as amended by the Treaty of Lisbon. Therefore, equality considerations should inform and guide all actions by the European Union, its Member States and public authorities.
In the current context of health, economic and environmental crisis, it is especially important that equality is taken into consideration for tackling the challenges the EU is facing. For building fairer societies, equality is a necessity, not a luxury. An essential development in this regard is the European Commission’s recent decision to set up a Task Force on Equality, specifically tasked to mainstream equality in all EU policies. A further step, beyond mainstreaming equality in the public sector, could be to ensure that equality considerations are also taken into account by private actors such as employers and service providers.
Equality bodies have built up considerable experience and expertise in promoting equality mainstreaming and this experience can be used to inform policymaking, both at European and national level. Therefore, this year Equinet set up a multi-annual cluster that brings together equality bodies, focusing on equality mainstreaming. Equality bodies across Europe, as public institutions concerned with promoting equality as a fundamental value and combating discrimination, play an important role in promoting and supporting both public and private actors in implementing equality mainstreaming.
In its first year, the cluster has been discussing the use of equality duties and equality impact assessments for mainstreaming equality as these are tools holding significant potential (also identified in Equinet’s recent “Recommendation for a fair and equal Europe: Rebuilding our societies after COVID-19”) and this is an area where Equinet and its members already have considerable experience and expertise. The Cluster has collected good practices from Equality Bodies across Europe on equality duties and equality impact assessments for mainstreaming equality and created a Compendium which informed this conference.
Conference Content
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Keynote speech
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Equality mainstreaming & equality bodies |
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Session I: Presentations on good practices by equality bodies |
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Session II: Challenges & opportunities of equality mainstreaming tools – Breakout rooms and feedback in plenary Breakout room 1: Protecting rights of older people to travel insurance
Breakout room 2: Mainstreaming equality in implementation of Welfare Development Plan
Breakout room 3: Preventing sexual harassment in public services |
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Session III: Cooperation for increasing effective equality mainstreaming
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Equinet, the European Network of Equality Bodies, brings together 47 organizations from across Europe, which are empowered to counteract discrimination as national equality bodies across a range of grounds including age, disability, gender, race or ethnic origin, religion or belief, and sexual orientation.