Equinet and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) co-organised a conference on poverty and discrimination. This conference aimed to review the links between poverty and discrimination, take stock of recent initiatives introducing socio-economic status as a discrimination ground and discuss what can be done at EU and national levels to break the vicious cycle of social exclusion.
The conference took place in the IHREC offices in Dublin on 22 March 2018. Read our press release here.
Combating poverty is a key undertaking of the European Union in the field of economic and social rights. This is reflected not only in the European Pillar of Social Rights, but also in fighting poverty and social exclusion being one of the five targets of Europe 2020, the EU’s ten-year jobs and growth strategy. Further to this, one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Equinet’s earlier work on ‘Addressing Poverty and Discrimination: Two Sides of the One Coin’ and ‘Equality Bodies Contributing to the Protection, Respect and Fulfilment of Economic and Social Rights’ demonstrates, based on the experiences of equality bodies, the inextricable link between discrimination and poverty. Most equality bodies have a broad mandate covering discrimination not only in the field of employment but also in fields such as housing, access to education, healthcare and other services where a number of grounds intersect with socio-economic status as a cause of social exclusion. Important intersections include the grounds of race and gender.
There is growing recognition that socio-economic status as a ground of discrimination is an important tool to tackle inequality. Recent years have seen legislative initiatives in a number of European jurisdictions where the anti-discrimination legislation did not historically recognize socio-economic status as a discrimination ground, including France and Ireland.
This conference aimed to:
Chair: Tena Šimonović Einwalter, Chair of the Equinet Executive Board and Deputy Ombudswoman of Croatia
Chair: Anne Gaspard, Equinet Executive Director
Chair: Tamás Kádár, Equinet Head of Legal and Policy
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Conference on Poverty & Discrimination: Two sides of the same coin, 22 March, Dublin |
You may also be interested in reading An analysis of the introduction socio-economic status as a discrimination ground, concentrating on including socioeconomic status as a ground for discrimination in Irish employment equality and equal status legislation.