When is an applicant an applicant? — About the potential abuse of non-discrimination law, ‘Equality Law-Hoppers’ and the EU equality law directives

By Dr Jule Mulder, Lecturer in Law (University of Bristol Law School).

sparbuch-DW-WebWelt-SchwerinIn its Kratzer judgment of 28 of July 2016,[i] the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) responded to the German Federal Labour Court’s preliminary reference concerned with the question what qualities are required to be an applicant who seeks access to employment, to self-employment or to occupation within the meaning of Article 3(1)(a) of the Framework Directive 2000/78/EC and Article 14(1)(a) Recast Directive 2006/54/EC. In it, the CJEU essentially rules that unserious applicants who do not actually seek employment but only apply for the purpose of claiming compensation do not fall under the scope of the directives and their respective articles. The case does not mention Article 3(1)(a) Race Directive 2000/43/EC but there is no reason to believe the conclusion would be any different regarding its application to employment and occupation.

The brief judgment, which was decided without prior opinion of the Advocate General, is unlikely to stir-up the European-wide debate on equality and non-discrimination law and may seem all too obvious to many commentators. However, for the German legal context, the judgment is very significant because it approves the national courts’ case law on the so called Equality Law-Hoppers (AGG-Hoppers) and leaves significant discretion to the national courts to counteract apparent as well as alleged abuses of the General Equal Treatment Act (Allgemeine Gleichbehandlungsgesetz, hereafter AGG)[ii] implementing the EU equality directives. (more…)