European Convention on Human Rights

ECHR - Protocol 12: Discrimination

Protocol 12 – discrimination

Main article: Protocol 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights

Applies the current expansive and indefinite grounds of prohibited discrimination in Article 14 to the exercise of any legal right and to the actions (including the obligations) of public authorities.

The Protocol entered into force on 1 April 2005 and has (as of March 2018) been ratified by 20 member states. Several member states—Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Lithuania, Monaco, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—have not signed the protocol.

The United Kingdom government has declined to sign Protocol 12 on the basis that they believe the wording of protocol is too wide and would result in a flood of new cases testing the extent of the new provision. They believe that the phrase "rights set forth by law" might include international conventions to which the UK is not a party and would result in incorporation of these instruments by stealth. It has been suggested that the protocol is therefore in a catch-22, since the UK will decline to either sign or ratify the protocol until the European Court of Human Rights has addressed the meaning of the provision, while the court is hindered in doing so by the lack of applications to the court concerning the protocol caused by the decisions of Europe's most populous states—including the UK—not to ratify the protocol. The UK government, nevertheless, stated in 2004 that it "agrees in principle that the ECHR should contain a provision against discrimination that is free-standing and not parasitic on the other Convention rights". The first judgment that found a violation of Protocol No. 12, Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, was delivered in 2009.