Part I

This volume is compiled at a remarkable time in the history of equality and anti-discrimination law in the European Union (EU). The EU has already achieved the expansion of its anti-discrimination grounds from just two under the E(E)C Treaty to seven following the Amsterdam Treaty, which incorporated Article 13 into the EC Treaty (EC). Article 13.1 EC empowers the Council to ‘take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation’. The first two Article 13 Directives, the Race Directive and the Employment Equality Directive are six years old at the time of writing and their implementation dates have all expired. The intriguing third such Directive, the Equal Treatment Directive between men and women in access to and supply of goods and services is already two years old. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has delivered some early judgments on this newly expanded body of equality and anti-discrimination law. But we do not yet have the full measure of the challenges presented by the new anti-discrimination grounds. Nor do we have the full measure of diversity arising from combinations of protected grounds, much less the ability of the Article 13 Directives to deal with them. There is also the increased diversity introduced to the EU by the accession of ten new Member States in 2004, two new Member States in 2007 and future enlargements of the Union to consider.