The Curia (Hungarian Supreme Court) stated in its ruling that length of service is not a protected characteristic under discrimination law. Length of employment cannot be considered as a core feature of the individual based on which he or she would belong to a specific group, as it is a result of his or her own actions. It therefore cannot be treated as a ‘miscellaneous’ ground for the purposes of the Hungarian Equal Treatment Act. Further, length of service cannot be linked to age discrimination. The length of service of an employee is not directly connected to age, therefore treatment of an employee based on length of service with a specific organisation cannot be considered age discriminatory.
A claim based on discrimination must be supported by a comparator. Employees with different educational backgrounds and jobs with different the educational requirements, are not comparable for the purposes of equal treatment law.

Requiring staff to complete five service years before progressing from the first to the second step on the salary scale, but requiring only two service years for each next step, is not age-discriminatory.

The ECJ found that a gay lecturer was not unlawfully discriminated against under an occupational pension scheme that did not entitle those over a certain age or sexual orientation to claim a survivor’s benefit for their (same-sex) civil partner or spouse.

The Dutch Cantonal judge prohibited a strike because the safety of passengers could not be guaranteed. At the hearing, which took place a few days after the Berlin Christmas market attacks, weight was given to the threat of terrorism. Nor is this the first time the threat of terrorism has been explicitly referred to by a Dutch court in a case concerning the right to strike.

For the first time, a Belgian court has relied on the Kaltoft case, which holds that obesity may constitute a disability. That case gives rise to protection against discrimination, according to the Labour Tribunal of Liège, even if it is falsely presumed. This is the case where an employer sends an email to an applicant stating that the applicant cannot be hired because his or her obesity is a disability in relation to the job.

Where no agreement is reached with employee representatives on a planned collective redundancy, the employer must try to obtain permission from the Minister for Labour – who rarely gives it. The employer in this case argued successfully that this was a serious obstacle to its to freedom to establish and conduct business in Greece.

The dismissal of a pregnant employee upon her employer’s business takeover was deemed to be unlawful discrimination.

A ‘temporary’ inability to work may qualify as a ‘long-term’ limitation within the meaning of the ECJ’s case law on Directive 2000/78. Whether this is the case is for the national court to determine. The court may take into account that it is not clear how long the person may take to recover.

In this paper, I study gender-based voting behavior in the Belgian proportional electoral system. In particular, I investigate two possible causes for why voters experience the need to simplify their voting decision by using a gender-cue. First, in line with the findings of previous studies, I find that voters with lower levels of political sophistication who are less able to collect and process political information, are consequently more likely to use the sex of a candidate as a shortcut. However, the effect of political sophistication on gender-based voting behavior is limited. Second, based on the literature, I expect that the low information context of the second-order European elections would cause both high and low information voters to become more reliant on gendercues to simplify their voting decision and by extent would cause the effect of political sophistication on gender-based voting to diminish. Against theoretical expectations, I find that the effect of the electoral context is negligible.