Discrimination Creep, Mandate Expansion and the Politicisation of Romania’s Equality Agency

Abstract

Against the background of literature on equality bodies and bureaucratic expansion, we examine the current crisis of confidence in Romania’s anti-discrimination agency, the National Council for Combating Discrimination (NCCD), a quasi-court. We argue that, through a process of conceptual creep, discrimination has been defined so generously that increasingly trivial acts are now sanctioned. This has generated increased strategic and opportunistic petitioning, with two consequences: raising the stakes of political control over the agency; and the agency’s increasingly difficult conceptual management of discrimination. We document ‘discrimination creep’ by analysing the Council’s case law on ‘discriminatory speech’, though our focus stays on the interaction of bureaucracy, expertise and activism which has enabled creep.