The European Court addressed these two issues of applicability very early in the operation of the Convention in the case ‘Relating to Certain Aspects of the Laws on the Use of Languages in Education in Belgium ’ (see below). The main dilemmas that recur in this case-law relate to the accessory nature and the autonomous status of Article 14 ECHR. Article 14 ECHR has a narrow scope and the case-law it has generated is both complicated and inconsistent. According to the Human Rights Committee’s General Comment 18: ‘Article 26 provides that all persons are equal before the law and are entitled to equal protection of the law without discrimination, and that the law shall guarantee to all persons equal and effective protections against discrimination on any of the enumerated grounds’.Īt the European level, the jurisprudence on the right to equality and non-discrimination is rather limited as the Court has dealt with relatively few discrimination claims. As Article 26 ICCPR is of a free-standing nature, its application is not confined to the rights contained in the Covenant. Of the supervisory mechanisms examined in this book, the Human Rights Committee is the body which has dealt with the principle of equality and non-discrimination in most detail and the Committee has developed extensive case-law on Article 26. In other words, it requires that all laws are applied equally to all people under the jurisdiction of the state without discrimination. On the other hand, provisions such as Article 26 ICCPR, Article 3 ACHPR, Article 24 ACHR, and Protocol 12 to the ECHR (as of July 2004 this Protocol had not entered into force) establish a general equality requirement according to which everyone must be treated equally before the law. The equal treatment provided for in these provisions refers only to the enjoyment of the rights contained in each of the instruments. On the one hand, a prohibition of discrimination in the enjoyment of the rights set out in the respective instrument, such as Article 2 ICCPR, Article 2 ACHPR, Article 1(1)ACHR, and Article 14 ECHR.
Human rights instruments generally contain two types of rights protecting equal treatment.
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