EU Court of Justice Ruling: Religious Signs — House of Lords, 2017-03-15
Topic: Civil Rights
Susan Williams (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will repeat in the form of a Statement a response made by my honourable friend Caroline Dinenage, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women, Equalities and Early Years, to an Urgent Question in another place on yesterday’s ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union. The Statement is as follows: "Mr Speaker, I thank my right honourable friend for raising this very important issue today and for giving the Government an opportunity to inform and, I hope, reassure the House about the two Court of Justice of the European Union judgments made yesterday. This Government are completely opposed to discrimination, including on the grounds of gender or religion, or both. It is the right of all women to choose how they dress and we do not believe these judgments change that. Exactly the same legal protections apply today as did before the rulings In both the Achbita and Bougnaoui cases, the judgments were that there was no direct discrimination, but that there was some discrimination. A rule is directly discriminatory if it treats someone less favourably because of their sex, their race, their religion or whatever. A rule is indirectly discriminatory if, on the face of it, it treats everyone the same but some people, because of their race, religion, sex and so on, find it harder to comply than others do. Indirect discrimination may be justifiable if an employer is acting in a proportionate manner to achieve a legitimate aim. The judgments confirm the existing long-standing position under EU and domestic law that an employer’s dress code, which applies to and is applied in the same way to all employees, may be justifiable if the employer can show some legitimate and proportionate grounds for it. Various cases show that such an employer needs to be prepared to justify those grounds in front of a court or tribunal, if need be. That will remain the case and it is the case in these judgments, which will now revert to their own domestic courts I am aware of some concern that these judgments potentially conflict with those of the European Court of Human Rights, particularly in the case of Nadia Eweida, the British Airways stewardess who was banned from wearing a small crucifix but whose case the ECHR upheld. We do not believe that the different judgments are in conflict. What both the CJEU and the ECHR were trying to do was assess the balance in each case between the religious needs of the employee and the needs of the employer. In Eweida the assessment favoured the employee: in another ECHR case, and in the Achbita case yesterday, it favoured the employer. We will still take action to ensure that the current legal position is set out. We will work with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to update guidance for employers for dealing with religion or belief in the workplace. It will be revised so that it takes account of the CJEU judgments as well. We will be making absolutely clear to all concerned that the Equality Act, and the rights of women and religious employees, remain unchanged Like any judgments of the CJEU—for the time being—Achbita and Bougnaoui need to be taken into account by domestic courts and tribunals as they consider future cases. The law is clear and remains unchanged. However, because of our absolute commitment to ensuring that discrimination and prejudice are never encouraged and never sanctioned, we will of course keep this issue under very close review going forward".