The crumbling public/private divide: horizontality in European anti-discrimination law

Abstract

The European Union has conducted, during the last decade, an active policy of adopting anti-discrimination directives that aim at ensuring greater convergence between member-state laws in this domain. One aspect of this evolution is that the relevant EU legislation forces some states to reconsider their traditional view that fundamental rights should be binding and enforceable only against state authorities and not against private bodies and individuals. This Europe-driven ‘horizontalization’ of anti-discrimination law is a major challenge for many national legal systems and contributes to the emergence of new but not uncontroversial conceptions of inclusive citizenship.