The Strasbourg Court and Indirect Race Discrimination: Going Beyond the Education Domain

Abstract

Prohibiting indirect discrimination has been hailed as guaranteeing substantive equality by addressing issues of structural discrimination and inequalities in a way that direct discrimination cannot and will not. However, Article 14, the ECHR's non‐discrimination provision, does not distinguish between direct and indirect discrimination. Only in 2007 the European Court of Human Rights explicitly included the notion of indirect (race) discrimination under Article 14 in DH and Others v Czech Republic, its famous judgment on Roma education segregation. Since then it has applied the prohibition of indirect race discrimination in a limited manner to similar education cases. However, in its recent Grand Chamber decision, Biao v Denmark, the Strasbourg Court started clarifying some unsolved issues in the distinction between direct and indirect discrimination in its case law and finally applied the concept to the much broader area of immigration and citizenship.