Suchergebnisse

The presentation explores whether housing law and anti-discrimination law can be reflected upon jointly in order to address socioeconomic inequalities, understood as major constraints to the access to adequate housing. The first section analyses the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of socioeconomic status as contained in selected international human rights instruments and in European Union law, in light of the guidance of the bodies tasked with their interpretation and application. The second section focuses specifically on housing, examining how the aforementioned prohibition applies in this field and which specific mechanisms ought to be put in place to effectively secure the right to housing of low-income groups.

The past three decades have witnessed dramatic transformations in Danish anti-discrimination law. Multiple methodologies—from semi-structured interviews and contemporary newspaper articles to empirical analyses of new datasets—are employed to elucidate how and why these shifts occurred. The analysis focuses on the agency of a small group of well-funded and sophisticated legal actors, who first harnessed the power of the preliminary reference procedure to advance gender discrimination claims in the 1980s and 1990s. This strategy was repeated—successfully—when Denmark adopted disability rights legislation for the first time in the 2000s. The present article builds—and offers a fresh perspective—on existing literature that investigates where, why and how Member State courts engage with EU law and the preliminary reference procedure.