GEO International - EU Directive

UK Consultation on the European Commission Proposal for an Equal Treatment Directive

UPDATE: Due to the high number of responses that we received in response to this consultation it is taking longer than expected to produce the summary. We now expect to be able to publish the summary in the new year. The summary will be published on this website.

Downloads

• Consultation document, including proposed text of Directive
• Impact Assessment
• Partial Equality Impact Assessment
• Commission’s Summary Impact Assessment
• Commission’s Full Impact Assessment
• Consultation document- Welsh
• Consultation document- Easy Read

EU Directive

On 2 July 2008 the European Commission published a draft anti-discrimination Directive.  This Directive proposes extending protection from discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services to cover disability, age, sexual orientation and religion or belief.

There are already EU Directives prohibiting discrimination and harassment on all the equality grounds in employment and vocational training; and on grounds of race and gender in the provision of goods, facilities and services.

The text of the draft Directive can be found on the EU website.  Also on the EU website are more documents that provide further details, for example the impact assessment prepared by the Commission, the findings of some research undertaken and details of a consultation exercise that the Commission undertook.

The UK Government welcomes the opportunity to consider the Commission's proposal for a new Directive and will work constructively with our European and domestic partners to ensure that any Directive adopted is effective in tackling discrimination.

In the UK we have already legislated domestically to prohibit discrimination in the provision of goods, facilities and services on grounds of sexual orientation, religion or belief and disability (as well as race and gender).  And we have recently announced that we will be introducing legislation banning discrimination on the grounds of age in these fields in the Equality Bill.