Discrimination on the ground of age is widespread in European societies and it can affect people at all stages of life, in employment as well as in other spheres. This Equinet Discussion Paper looks at age discrimination from a legal point of view, identifying the trends and themes that have arisen linked to discrimination on the ground of age across Europe.
Objective
The objective of our Discussion Paper is to provide the readers with a general legal overview on the topic of age discrimination including the European legal framework (developed by European Union and Council of Europe), international case law and work of national equality bodies. We identified several issues that are common in various jurisdictions across European countries. The document is intended for equality bodies, lawyers, national authorities, NGOs and academia. It cannot aspire to be a comprehensive analysis of all issues in the field of age discrimination but we hope that it will contribute to the discussions and will trigger further analyses.
Overview
At the beginning we introduce the legal framework for protection against age discrimination. We also present the trends and themes which have emerged from the national cases described in the equality bodies’ submissions. The opening chapter is followed by the field-specific parts that tackle the issue of age discrimination regarding employment (Chapter 2), provision of goods and services (Chapter 3), housing (Chapter 4) and health and family issues (Chapter 5). An annex to the discussion paper collects all the case law on age discrimination submitted by equality bodies.
This Discussion Paper was prepared by the members of the Equinet Working Group on Equality Law. It is based on cases and analyses submitted by 22 equality bodies. Read the Discussion Paper, the relevant annex and an infographic of main findings here.
Seminar on tackling Ageism & Age Discrimination
On 27-28 June, Equinet organised a capacity building seminar entitled “Tackling Age Discrimination against Older Persons: Building Bridges between Equality Bodies & Older Persons’ Organisations”, together with AGE Platform Europe. It was hosted in Berlin by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency.