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Poverty remains largely unfamiliar to discrimination law. Iterations of the right to equality and non-discrimination based on the grounds of race, colour, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, etc, have seldom included poverty or its attendant deprivations like unemployment, reliance on social assistance, deprivation of education, homelessness, or starvation. The result is that, poverty not only fails to make it to the inner circle of protected characteristics but also fails to be understood and addressed as discrimination at all. This article studies the leading examples of judicial engagement with poverty discrimination in some of the most progressive discrimination regimes – Canada, South Africa, and India. The aim is to identify the nature of poverty discrimination, its judicial treatment and possible redressal within comparative discrimination law. The article delineates a key 'intersectional' feature of poverty discrimination as one which intersects with: (i) multiple disadvantages of redistribution (joblessness, homelessness, malnutrition, illiteracy), recognition (stereotypes, stigma, humiliation), participation (social and political exclusion), and transformation (structural domination); as well as (ii) multiple grounds and status-identities (race, colour, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, etc). The appreciation of this complex and crosscutting intersectional nature is possible – as has been hitherto tried – not only by reading in poverty as a ground, but also by opening up ways of thinking about poverty as central to our substantive understanding of equality and non-discrimination per se. Treating poverty as a matter discriminatory context or as a matter of substantive equality are two such worthwhile lessons to take a cue from. With this, the article seeks to reclaim the position of poverty in discrimination law, first, by critiquing the exclusion of the worst and most debilitating effects of poverty because of its intersectional nature; and secondly, by providing alternative ways of thinking about poverty as a site of discrimination. Keywords: Poverty, Discrimination, Substantive Equality, Grounds, Intersectionality

The Court of Justice of the European Union decided its first ever discrimination claim argued explicitly on two grounds-sexual orientation and age-on 24 November 2016. It found that no discrimination could exist on both grounds where no discrimination existed on the grounds considered separately. With this, the Court rejected the possibility of recognising discrimination based on two grounds combined together and thus the relevance of intersectionality in European Union (EU) discrimination law. This note critiques the decision in Parris v Trinity College Dublin not only for disregarding intersectional discrimination but also for its weak single-ground analysis. In particular, the note argues that the Court failed: (i) to appreciate the normative basis of intersectionality- as creating unique patterns of disadvantage based on a combination of grounds-and how it transpires in practice; and (ii) in the alternative, to apply the Employment Directive 2000/78 correctly to claims of sexual orientation and age discrimination and in the light of its discrimination jurisprudence. The failure in Parris thus signifies a lost opportunity for the Court to address complex forms of structural inequality in EU law.

2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and thus of the oldest self-standing general right to non-discrimination in international law under article 26. The Human Rights Committee has enforced the right with rigour creating a vast and formidable body of discrimination jurisprudence over the decades. This jurisprudence, though, is doggedly single-dimensional and appears to have given short shrift to discrimination based on multiple and intersecting grounds of article 26, viz race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. This article examines the curious case of missing intersectional discrimination in the ICCPR. It does so by pulling together the dispersed and often unidentified claims based on more than one ground of discrimination. It delineates the pathologies of reasoning in these claims which have overlooked the idea of 'intersectionality' understood as disadvantage based on multiple and intersecting grounds, which is both similar to and different from disadvantage based on individual grounds. The article shows that this conceptual reckoning matters in identifying and addressing discrimination, and thus enforcing the commitment in article 26 of addressing not just single-ground discrimination but 'any discrimination' against 'all persons' on 'any ground … or other status.'

In the world's largest democracy, which frequently prizes itself for its "diversity", how has intersectional discrimination been excluded from the ambit of Article 15 of the Indian Constitution to date? This article is interested in examining this inscrutability. The motivation is to explore how intersectionality needs to manoeuvre the foundational roadblock of the constricted view of discrimination as based only on a single ground. Through the example of sex discrimination, the article examines how the interpretation of the general constitutional guarantee of non-discrimination contained in clause (1) of Article 15 has restricted the prohibition of discrimination to a single ground, preventing the recognition of intersectional discrimination. However, as this article argues, a legitimate interpretation of clause (1) neither makes it a closed list of grounds nor limits it to single ground discrimination; but instead is concerned with finding the basis of discrimination in enumerated or analogous grounds. The final analysis thus offers a qualitative reconstruction of Article 15(1) by linking the basis of discrimination to grounds, incorporating the possibility of accommodating multiple grounds in a discrimination claim.

"This collection of essays analyses how the diversity in human identity and disadvantage affects the articulation, realisation, violation and enforcement of human rights. The question arises from the realisation that people, who are severally and severely disadvantaged because of their race, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, class etc, often find themselves at the margins of human rights; their condition seldom improved and sometimes even worsened by the rights discourse. How does one make sense of this relationship between the complexity of people's disadvantage and violation of their human rights? Does the human rights discourse, based on its universal and common values, have tools, methods or theories to capture and respond to the difference in people's lived experience of rights? Can intersectionality help in that quest? This book seeks to inaugurate this line of inquiry"--