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This chapter provides context for disability and employment policy in the European Union (EU) by highlighting the key provisions of the EU’s founding treaties in these areas. It then outlines relevant aspects of the three EU-level strategies that together set out EU disability employment policy: hard law, or legislative intervention, requiring member states to ensure that certain specified requirements or standards are achieved by their domestic law; experimentalist governance, in the form of the Open Method of Co-ordination; and direct funding. Finally, the chapter identifies lessons that can be learned from the EU’s experience of harnessing these three different tools to achieve its strategic objectives and to consider the extent to which they might have relevance to the world beyond the rather unique parameters of the EU.

This concluding chapter addresses transnational law. Public international law and European Union law are by no means the only transnational legal orders. There are also smaller transnational systems in South America or Africa which are modeled on European Union law, but which lag far behind in terms of importance and level of sophistication. The context of public international law is marked by a number of features which distinguish it from the various contexts of national law. At a very general level, public international law is characterized by a stronger interweaving of fact and law; heightened importance of politics; and a less technical approach to norms, their text, and their meaning than lawyers may be accustomed to. Meanwhile, European Union law is an independent legal system which, at least in its present, highly-developed form, has much more in common with national legal systems than with public international law.

This chapter examines religious discrimination in civil law and the impact of European Union law in this field. It explores the principle of religious equality, the prohibition of religious discrimination, the fields of religious discrimination (such as in employment and the provision of goods and services), the types of religious discrimination (such as direct and indirect discrimination), and exceptions enjoyed by religious organizations. It then examines crimes against the person motivated by religion. It explores incitement of religious discrimination and hatred (with particular regard to the actus reus and mens rea of such crimes, as well as the penalties which may be imposed), criminal offences aggravated or mitigated by religion, and illicit sects.

The chapter evaluates dialogue between the UK courts and the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice. It explains how the different constitutional relationship between these two different European courts and UK courts means that they facilitate different forms of inter-institutional interactions. This is particularly the case given the principle of the primacy of directly effective European Union law, and the lack of an established doctrine of the margin of appreciation in European Union law. The chapter evaluates interactions between the UK courts and these European courts, providing a framework of interactions that are more likely to facilitate democratic dialogue.

The exploration of the development of the gender mainstreaming strategy and its effect on, European legislation concerning gender equality, from its beginnings to today is the aim of this chapter.The focus is on the role of the European Union in promoting substantive equality for men and women improving legislation in the European Union context and favouring a cultural change in the gender equality perspective. Gender mainstreaming is analysed as the main legislative and cultural shift done for promoting gender equality in all European policies. Gender mainstreaming legislation requires the adoption of a gender perspective by all the central actors in the policy process and, even considering its limits and blunders, and is still the most crucial transnational strategy currently in existence that promotes gender equality in all domains of social life. The legislation enquiries raised at the beginning of the gender mainstreaming implementation process in the EU around 1996 focused on the potential role of the EU in bridging the gap between formal and substantive equality, until nowadays and most recent guidelines, are the issues of the discussion in the chapter.

The first chapter outlines that most national health laws assume a special connection between health law and policy and fundamental rights and values. The denial or approval of authorization of a specific controversial medication, or the payment for health care in a Member State other than the home state of insurance—and many of the other questions and issues that are addressed in the EU with regard to human health—illustrate that the involvement of the EU in human health can also involve controversial questions, where fundamental rights, bioethical issues, regulatory problems, and redistributive choices may intertwine. This calls into question the power the EU has in this regard, particularly if we take into consideration that human health law and policy are often seen in light of a special reciprocal relationship with fundamental rights and values. Infringements of fundamental rights can harm human health, for instance in cases of torture, or discrimination against people with a particular disease such as HIV/AIDS or mental disorders. At the same time health policy can affect fundamental rights, such as when obligatory vaccination programmes or quarantines are ordered. Hence fundamental rights and values form a benchmark for analysing the legitimacy of health policy. The specific values and rights that are internal to health law set the agenda for this book.

The concluding chapter sums up the overall findings of the project through three different strands of analysis: the first breaks down the eleven jurisdictions into three groups based on the relative quantity and impact of Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) citations found in these jurisdictions. By drawing conclusions from all the country reports through a comparative and macro-perspective, the goal is to distil the insights of the entire project and formulate policy recommendations in the light of EU external policy and legal integration objectives vis-à-vis its neighbourhood; the second examines the many factors that a priori could have an impact on whether judges are likely to cite the CJEU in their judgments, and then discusses what the research has found in relation to the actual role played by these factors; the third tries to place the current project into the context of overall research on the global reach of EU law, which can be ‘exported’ to non-members of the EU through various mechanisms, such as mutual and formal agreement or through more unilateral and spontaneous forms. They include modes of extraterritorial application of EU law, territorial extension, and the so-called ‘Brussels Effect’. The chapter concludes with some general observations and thoughts and formulates possible policy recommendations.

The chapter sets out the array of human rights protections in the United Kingdom, examining the protections found in the Human Rights Act 1998, European Union law, and the common law. The chapter also evaluates the way in which these protections of human rights can facilitate democratic dialogue, looking in particular at the relationship between section 3 and section 4 of the Human Rights Act 1998 and deference. It establishes a detailed normative framework of inter-institutional interactions, using the case of Nicklinson in order to evaluate the extent to which the judgments in that case facilitated or hindered democratic dialogue.