Pick Our Brains

The Pick our Brains sessions of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights are for both PhD students and more senior members of our Centre and members of other research centres and universities. These sessions are intended as a mode of intellectual stimulation and exchange, or to potentially promote collaborations within/outside the Centre. The sessions are also designed as an opportunity to get feedback on ongoing/upcoming research, showcase recent research and events at which you presented, as well as to enable an exchange of scholarly ideas. Each session contains a short presentation and a lively debate. A small lunch is provided as well. 

These sessions will take place physically and online. The Zoom link for the online sessions will be distributed later.  

On 7 November our speaker is Nozizwe Dube (PhD Candidate, Maastricht University). The title of the presentation is "Surmounting EU Equality Law’s Impasse on Intersectionality With the Help of International Human Rights Law".

This is the abstract:
More than three decades after the concept of intersectionality first entered the realm of equality law scholarship, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is yet to acknowledge intersectional discrimination in its equality case law. Wedged between a unidimensional discrimination analysis and a fragmented equality legislative framework, EU equality law is at an impasse regarding intersectionality. This presentation posits that adopting a capacious approach to discrimination grounds, a precedent set in international human rights law by treaty bodies such as the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, offers an intermediate solution that can enable the CJEU to initiate the development of an intersectional equality analysis. However, though a capacious approach possesses this advantage, it also has significant shortcomings. First, a capacious approach encourages the erosion of intersectionality’s synergistic core by consolidating the current unidimensional analysis and fragmented equality framework. Second, because of the erosion of intersectionality’s synergistic core, there lurks the risk of an inconsistent implementation of the capacious approach by the CJEU. Hence, a capacious approach to grounds is not the panacea to the CJEU’s impasse on intersectionality. Rather, it is merely an opportunity to sow the first seeds for the development of a sound intersectional equality analysis that ultimately leads to intersectional redistributive justice.