Paper Titles & Abstracts

Since the adoption of the Race Equality Directive 2000/48/EC and the amended Equal Treatment Directive 2002/73/EC, each member state of the European Union is required to designate domestic anti-discrimination bodies. These statutory bodies are crucial for dealing with discrimination, as they inter alia investigate individual complaints, conduct strategic investigations or provide advice to the administration. Rather than merely transposing the directives, which demand institutional support exclusively against ethnic and gender discrimination, most member states have designated more extensive integrated anti-discrimination bodies that promote equal opportunities and fight discrimination based on age, disability, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion or belief or other grounds. These developments on the domestic level suggest that integrated anti-discrimination bodies should to some extent upgrade the protection against discrimination for the various grounds. Yet the preliminary analysis of the theoretical literature and empirical data shows that it remains unclear why we see discrepancies in the enforcement of such provisions across recognized discrimination grounds. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis, this paper investigates whether the Hungarian antidiscrimination body privileges certain inequality grounds over others in its activities. The paper will also offer preliminary findings on the impact of domestic policy trajectories on the institutional practices of the anti-discrimination body. Since this paper builds on a comparative study, preliminary findings of the comparison of institutional practices of anti-discrimination bodies in Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands inform the analysis.