Racialised Poverty and Article 14 ECHR: The Role of Equality and Discrimination Law

Abstract

Evidence suggests that racialised minorities disproportionately live in poverty across Europe and the world. The documentation of poverty as a racialised phenomenon is accompanied by a steady stream of discrimination complaints under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that, at their heart, exemplify different manifestations of racialised poverty in Europe. However, the dominant interpretation of Article 14 impedes the European Court of Human Rights from addressing racialised poverty as an issue of equality and discrimination law. This thesis analyses why racialised poverty remains marginal to the European human rights agenda, with a specific focus on Article 14, and proposes an alternative interpretation of Article 14 to respond to the challenge of racialised poverty. Despite a continuing interest in anchoring poverty-related concerns within the ECHR in general, the subject of racialised poverty has received little scholarly attention so far. To offer a deeper understanding of the relationship between race and poverty, Part I of the thesis advances a theoretical account of racialised poverty as intersectional, cyclical, and structural in nature that manifests through processes such as expropriation, segregation, expulsion, and violence. In relation to racialised poverty, so conceived, equality and discrimination law performs three key roles: it exposes and magnifies the structural patterns and networks of group-based disadvantage, it bridges socio-economic inequalities and status inequalities, and it enhances representation, participation and voice of disadvantaged groups. This theoretical groundwork informs the analysis in the rest of the thesis. Part II of the thesis asks why the Court finds it difficult to address racialised poverty claims under Article 14. It identifies two key challenges in the dominant interpretation of Article 14, namely (i) judicial disattention to Article 14 complaints and (ii) the Court’s understanding of causation in discrimination law that resists the intersectional, cyclical, and structural dimensions of racialised poverty. Part III of the thesis draws on peripheral strands of the Court’s jurisprudence to reveal how, despite these challenges, Article 14 holds significant potential to address racialised poverty. To make the case for framing racialised poverty as an issue of equality and discrimination law, it proposes conceptual and doctrinal shifts throughout Article 14 doctrine. It conceptually reinterprets Article 14 as forming an integral part of each ECHR right and as entailing a pluralist account of wrongful discrimination. It also consolidates doctrinal shifts related to protected grounds, causation, comparison, the relationship between direct and indirect discrimination, the evidentiary framework, and justifications. The thesis finally puts these shifts to practice by showing how racialised poverty claims under Article 14 trigger distinct negative and positive obligations of states. In this manner, it offers a reinterpretation of the role, relevance, and content of Article 14 in responding to the challenge of racialised poverty in Europe.