Sandra Fredman

• University of Oxford

This book is about the operation of equality and discrimination law in times of crisis. It aims to understand: (i) how existing inequalities are exacerbated in crises; and (ii) whether equality law has tools to understand and address this contingency. Experience during the Covid-19 crisis shows that the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for ‘exponen...

This book is about the operation of equality and discrimination law in times of crisis. It aims to understand: (i) how existing inequalities are exacerbated in crises; and (ii) whether equality law has tools to understand and address this contingency. Experience during the Covid-19 crisis shows that the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for ‘exponen...

This book is about the operation of equality and discrimination law in times of crisis. It aims to understand: (i) how existing inequalities are exacerbated in crises; and (ii) whether equality law has tools to understand and address this contingency. Experience during the Covid-19 crisis shows that the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for ‘exponen...

This book is about the operation of equality and discrimination law in times of crisis. It aims to understand: (i) how existing inequalities are exacerbated in crises; and (ii) whether equality law has tools to understand and address this contingency. Experience during the Covid-19 crisis shows that the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for ‘exponen...

This article examines what role equality law can play in addressing the inequalities created and exacerbated by the British government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We argue that while there is great potential in existing legislation, there is a need for both policy-makers and courts to apply a more searching and nuanced understanding of the...

Tolerance has always been a central principle underpinning freedom of religion. But what if a person’s deeply held beliefs include intolerance of others’ rights or freedoms? Does tolerance of religious difference include tolerating intolerant behaviours? The paradox of tolerance has been thrown into relief by recent case-law on ‘complicity’ claims...

Submission to the UK Women and Equalities Committee that analysing the government's obligations under the Equality Act and Human Rights by exploring the disproportionate impact of COVID on women's reproductive rights and role in unpaid care work

This paper introduces the Fairwork Foundation, a research initiative that is also developing an intervention around the quality of work on digital labour platforms. Lacking the ability to collectively bargain, many platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers. As a result of this new, digitally-...

This chapter argues that human rights and the SDGs should work together to eliminate extreme poverty. The goals articulated in the SDG agenda should be closely tied to legally binding human rights instruments so that they are viewed as entitlements, rather than policy aspirations. Conversely, the SDGs should be used to provide detailed content to b...

For many men and women Parliament is a workplace. As a workplace, it is imperative that Parliament be gender inclusive. Our submission to the Women and Equalities Committee outlines concrete actions that Parliament can take to ensure that all people are treated equally in Parliament.

This chapter suggests a four-dimensional conception of substantive equality to evaluate the gendered impacts of taxation policies from a human rights perspective. The four-dimensional framework of substantive equality in relation to gender regards the right to equality as aiming to, first, redress disadvantage (the redistributive dimension); second...

1. INTRODUCTION In holding that Uber drivers are ‘workers’ for the purposes of the National Minimum Wage and paid holidays, the majority of the Court of Appeal has made an important contribution towards the goal of decent work for Uber drivers in London.¹ At the same time, the decision underscores yet again the fragility of using the distinction be...

Education is a multiplier right. Without education, other rights cannot be fully enjoyed. Education is also an accelerator right: it equips people to enter the labour force and participate in public life. However, education is not only an instrumental right. It should primarily be regarded as an intrinsic right, valuable in its own terms. Section I...

——Chapter seven examines abortion. A comparative approach reveals the pivotal role of the characterization of relevant rights. Is this an issue of the right to life, to privacy, or to equality? Running through these issues are the cross-cutting themes identified above, particularly the interaction between legislatures and courts. Section II demonst...

Housing is frequently regarded as a matter for the political sphere, rather than a fundamental human right. At most, housing is seen as a socio-economic right, progressively realizable subject to available resources. By contrast, protection against State intrusion into home, family, or private life is widely accepted as a core human right. Section...

On the face of it, judges are tasked with applying the law, not making it. Yet human rights are framed in general terms, requiring judges to draw on external values to interpret. Some regard judicial interpretation as gaining legitimacy only when true to the original intention of the drafters; or the text’s natural meaning. Others regard the human...

Is health a human right? Many would maintain that it is not. On this view health and ill-health are due to natural causes, not to State actions. Others are concerned that health raises too many polycentric problems to be dealt with through justiciable human rights. These contestations have shaped the way in which the right to health is understood....

While the notion of fundamental human rights attracts general respect, there is little agreement on how we identify rights or their substantive content and application. This chapter addresses several ways of addressing these foundational disagreements. One is to formulate a moral principle, from which human rights can be derived. The chapter critic...

This chapter critically examines the ways in which civil and political rights have been distinguished from socio-economic rights, including differing ideologies, subject matter; obligations, resource implications, and justiciability. Instead of such bright-line distinctions, it suggests that all rights should be seen as giving rise to a cluster of...

Courts in different jurisdictions face similar human rights questions. Does the death penalty breach human rights? Does freedom of speech include racist speech? Is there a right to health? This book uses the prism of comparative law to examine the fascinating ways in which these difficult questions are decided. On the one hand, the shared language...

This chapter addresses the argument that human rights should be not be the responsibility of courts, but of the legislature. Instead of regarding courts and the legislature as mutually exclusive, however, it asks whether we can create a role for justiciable human rights which reinforces democracy. Section II considers democratic objections to justi...

This chapter considers freedom of religion in relation to three themes. The first concerns the separation of State and religion. Although a strict separation is seen as fundamental in some jurisdictions, others see religion as central to society and therefore a legitimate area of State involvement. The second concerns individual freedom of belief a...

Human rights law is particularly ripe for a comparative approach. There is a broadly similar common core of human rights, and when analogous issues arise, we would expect to see equivalent answers. Yet there are real complexities in the use of comparative human rights law. Given the important social, political, and legal differences between jurisdi...

This chapter assesses the theories justifying freedom of speech (Section II). Section III considers how free speech is protected by human rights instruments. The absence of an express limitation clause in the US First Amendment contrasts with other jurisdictions, which permit justifiable limitations. Sections IV–VII consider how courts have dealt w...

This chapter applies the cross-cutting themes in Chapters 1–5 to the highly contested issue of the death penalty. It begins by considering the differences in constitutional texts, and particularly the ambiguity as to whether the death penalty is permitted. This requires judges to apply their interpretive theories. Original intent, natural meaning,...

The first part of this book sets out the themes which form the analytic framework for subsequent chapters: the role of comparative materials; the meaning of human rights; the relationship between civil and political rights and socio-economic rights; the role of adjudication; and approaches to judicial interpretation. Subsequent chapters apply these...

Thousands of children from minority and disadvantaged groups will never cross the threshold of a classroom. What can human rights contribute to the struggle to ensure that every learner is able to access high quality education? This brilliant interdisciplinary collection explores how a human rights perspective offers new insights and tools into th...

This concluding chapter argues that a human rights-based approach to education offers a promising framework for identifying and addressing the obstacles that stand in the way of minorities and disadvantaged groups enjoying equal rights to quality education. It should serve as a blueprint for laws, policies, and programmes geared towards achieving S...

This chapter studies the right to substantive equality in education. The right to equality demands much more than parity for girls and boys in education. Simply requiring parity ignores the specifically gendered way in which inequality in education manifests itself. Instead, it is argued that the principle of substantive equality should be the fram...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between human rights and equality in education. Education has been recognised as a fundamental human right at least since 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared that everyone has the right to free and compulsory education. Importantly, the right extends beyond...

This collection of essays has explored a range of challenges faced by minorities and disadvantaged groups in education. The book demonstrates how a human rights-based approach brings these challenges into sharper focus and offers a framework for addressing them so that we can achieve quality education for all. These insights are enriched through th...

This interdisciplinary collection explores how a human rights perspective offers new insights and tools into the current obstacles to education. It examines the role of private actors, the need to hold states to account, the balance between religion, culture and education, girls’ right to education and the role of courts.

Thousands of children from minority and disadvantaged groups will never cross the threshold of a classroom. What can human rights contribute to the struggle to ensure that every learner is able to access high-quality education? This book explores how a human rights perspective offers new insights and tools into the current obstacles to education. I...

Oxford Human Rights Hub publication. || Analyses and comments on draft General Comment 5 of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, drawing on equality theory relating to substantive equality and intersectionality.

The limitations of a formal interpretation of the right to equality are now well recognized. However, the meaning of substantive equality remains deeply contested. This article argues that the right to substantive equality should not be collapsed into a single formula, such as dignity, or equality of opportunity or results. Instead, drawing on fami...

The equality guarantee in Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms has often been regarded as an insipid right. However, recent jurisprudence indicates that the European Court of Human Rights has taken a more robust stand. This article assesses recent developments to determine whether we can now discern a coher...

It is generally agreed by most observers that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have fallen short of achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. Today, women continue to be more likely than men to live in poverty, and more than 18 million girls in sub-Saharan Africa are out of school. One of the crucial reasons for the failure of the M...

The full report can be found at https://www.un-ilibrary.org/women-and-gender-issues/gender-equality-and-human-rights_e50499ba-en

Although there is a broadly similar core of human rights law and courts in different jurisdictions face strikingly similar questions, the use of comparative law in the human rights context remains controversial. Reference to foreign human rights materials is regarded as undemocratic, selective and misleading. Rather than searching for a single ‘rig...

The attempt to secure maternity rights has been a major focus of decades of campaigning for women's equality. However, it is of concern that maternity rights might reinforce women's responsibility for childcare. This paper considers how we bring men back into the frame, through a critical assessment of the contrasting approaches in Europe and the U...

Terms such as 'Social Europe' and 'European Social Model' have long resided in the political and regulatory lexicon of European integration. But in recent years, and in spite of the adoption of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the EU social profile has entered a profound period of crisis. The ECJ judgments of Viking and Laval exemplify the unreso...

The rigid divide between a standard employment contract and other work relations has always presented particular difficulties for women. There is a fundamental mismatch between the binary divide that is inscribed in law and many women’s experience, in which the boundaries between paid and unpaid work, between public and private, and between the lab...

The right to equality has been a key barometer of the EU commitment to a social dimension. It was a market imperative which led to the inclusion of the right to equal pay for equal work for men and women in Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome, preventing the distortion of competition caused by paying women less for the same work as men. However, in t...

Is it legitimate to use discriminatory policies to achieve equality? As official support for reverse discrimination or affirmative action policies becomes more common among member states of the European Union, so does the potential for legal challenge. Yet no clear answer has yet been given by the European Court of Justice. The controversial Europe...

A key advance of the Equality Act 2010 is its introduction of a single equality duty. The new ‘public sector equality duty’ harmonises the earlier duties and extends its coverage to include other protected characteristics. In addition, the statutory aims have been deepened to reflect a substantive conception of equality. However, the core of the du...

Introduction, Although the United Kingdom (UK) signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in July 1981, it was not ratified until April 1986. This lack of interest in the substance of the Convention has marked the attitude of successive governments ever since. The CEDAW is little known and little u...

Transformation in South Africa is intimately bound up with a vigorous development of the principle of equality. However, as the second decade of the new democracy draws to a close, the challenges facing the equality principle are more complex than ever. Equality before the law, is far from sufficient to bring about the far-reaching social and insti...

Traditionally in the UK, distributive inequalities have been dealt with quite separately from inequality based on sex, race, or other ‘status’. While distributive inequalities are regarded as the domain of the political sphere, inequality on grounds of ‘status’ is dealt with by anti-discrimination laws. It is thus of considerable importance that th...

Socio-economic rights and equality have the potential to form a powerful partnership. However, the precise relationship in the context of gender remains controversial. In this article, I argue that simply extending socio-economic rights to women is not sufficient. This does little to address the gendered nature of social institutions and structures...

When the Human Rights Act was introduced in 1998, it was taken for granted that the project of bringing rights home simply entailed incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is only now, over a decade later, that attention is being paid to the content of those rights. Re-opening the debate portends both peril and promise. The ris...

Gender inequality across Europe remains elusive. Figures from 2007 show that across Europe women earn on average 17.4 % less than men. Although women’s participation in the paid labour force is increasing, labour markets continue to be highly segregated, with women clustering in lower paid sectors or grades. Moreover, the increased participation of...

Human rights have traditionally been divided into two kinds: civil and political rights and social, economic and cultural rights. Civil and political rights have been understood to refer to rights which protect individuals against intrusion by the state, while social and economic rights concern rights to protection by the state against want or need...

Socio-economic rights and equality have the potential to form a powerful partnership. However, the precise relationship in the context of gender remains controversial. In this article, I argue that simply extending socio-economic rights to women is not sufficient. This does little to address the gendered nature of social institutions and structures...

Despite 33 years of equal pay legislation, the gender pay gap remains stubbornly high. Multiple equal pay claims in the public sector have forcefully exposed the weaknesses, both of the Equal Pay Act and of the complaints-led model of enforcement on which it is based. This article argues that the equal pay apparatus is in need of radical reform. Si...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...

This book moves beyond the artificial boundary between socio-economic and civil and political rights and instead focuses on the positive duties to which all rights give rise. Human rights have traditionally been understood as protecting individual freedom against intrusion by the State. This book argues that human rights are based on a far richer v...