Switzerland discriminating against men on pension benefits, ECHR finds
bbc.com
bbc.com
This law reminds me of that. All these laws should be realigned.
(This instead seems to be good old-fashioned sex-based discrimination, like the draft in the US.)
The fact that the were subject to ECHR jurisdiction is.
The ECHR has immense respect for countries political processes, and allows all sorts of nasty laws (gay marriage bans, etc).
My point is that this sort of micromanagement does not seem consistent with the ECHRs usual hands-off approach.
This is in part because the US legal system is based on common law / case law, whereas most of Europe is based on civil law.
For instance, decriminalization of abortion in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Morgentaler
> ARTICLE 14 Prohibition of discrimination The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.
I suspect the fiction of fitting a “male breadwinner” exception into this clear language became unsustainable.
Doesn’t this forbid restrictions on same-sex marriage?
> In Chapin and Charpentier v. France, 2016, the Court reiterated that neither Article 12, nor Article 14 in conjunction with Article 8, which was more general in purpose and scope, could be interpreted as imposing an obligation on the Contracting States to open marriage to same sex couples.
https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Guide_Art_12_ENG.pdf (see also https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-...)
I don't know much about European law but it seems one of the principal reasons is that Articles 8 and 12 specifically speak to marriage and are worded in a manner (in the court's opinion) which presume heterosexual marriages, effectively circumscribing the scope of potential Article 14 anti-discrimination protections wrt marriage.
The EHCR has found the use of “men and women,” along with the “historical context” in which the clause was adopted, to mean that Article 12 applies to marriage as traditionally understood: between one man and one woman.
Any thoughts about whether, in EU countries, it might be easier for the political process to make changes via legislation and constitutional amendment --- as opposed to the U.S. system of giving minority interest groups such extensive blocking rights?
(The U.S. system sometimes reminds me — and not in a good way — of the liberum veto of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which every (noble) member of the Sejm, or parliament, could block government action. Historians seem to agree that, over the long term, this arrangement was seriously-bad news for the Polish nation; quaere whether the U.S. might go down that path itself.)
And yet we have a reasonably liberal abortion regime nationwide - which is not due to the courts (we have no constitutional right to abortion), but simply the outcome of the democratic legislative process in each state. I think it never became quite the political/cultural hot potato here as it did in the US, in part because it was left up to elected officials rather than unelected judges. Even if someone doesn’t like the current situation, it is harder to object to the legitimacy of it when the people the voters voted for are responsible for it.
I think one relevant difference is that as a country with a smaller population and a shorter (post-colonisation) history, there is arguably less inter-state cultural diversity in Australia. We don’t really have “red states” and “blue states” - some states lean more one way than the other, but it is much less polarised than the US.