Three Ideas: The Scope of EU Law Protecting Against Discrimination

Abstract

The issue of when EU law applies, its scope, is obviously important and yet it has no clear answer. Two extreme positions are that EU law has a general scope, which it does not, and that all EU law provisions have different scopes, which clarifies nothing. This article explores the middle ground by seeking to identify underlying ideas capable of explaining when different EU law provisions apply on the national level and why seemingly similar provisions differ in scope. The article studies under what conditions an individual seeking protection against discrimination can invoke EU law on the national level and concludes that EU law provisions preventing discrimination differ greatly in scope but that such differences can be explained by the fact that they are based on different ideas: the idea of the internal market, the idea of actor equivalence, or the idea of a Europe without borders.

Keywords: EU law, discrimination, scope, application, gender equality, general principles, fundamental freedoms