Age as a Sign of Discrimination: on the Example of the European Court of Human Rights

The article is devoted to the problems of discrimination, especially one of them - age discrimination. Discrimination is recognized as a situation in which a person and / or group of persons on their grounds is restricted in recognizing, exercising or exercising their rights and freedoms in any form.

The case of Schwitzgebel v. Switzerland was analyzed, the essence of which was that an unmarried woman of a certain age was denied the adoption of a second child. She was denied due to the government's legal policy on family matters. The applicant's age was crucial in rejecting her application by the domestic authorities. The applicant could claim that she had been the victim of a difference in treatment compared to younger single women, who could have been entitled to adopt a second child under the same circumstances. The denial of her request pursued the legitimate aim of protecting the welfare and rights of the child. Thus, the European Court of Human Rights has quite rejected the motives of age discrimination.

It has been proven that age discrimination is not an independent sign of discrimination. Quite often this happens in addition to gender motives. In the case of Carvalho Pinto de Sousa Morais v. Portugal, which amounts to improper medical intervention by a medical court, the applicant's age was presumed. The National Court held that sexuality and social life were not as important to the applicant at her age as to men of the same age. The European Court of Human Rights was therefore obliged to accept the grounds of age and other discrimination.

Paragraph 141 of the Manual of Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Protocol No. 12 to the Convention also states that age is a "different status" for the purposes of Article 14. However, it should be noted that the ECtHR seldom recognizes age as a sign of discrimination.

In general, the analysis of the European Court of Human Rights indicates the following: there are very few decisions on age discrimination; The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms does not contain a separate list of age discrimination and refers to these circumstances as "other features" indistinguishable from current national law; in general, age discrimination is associated with other violations, usually gender discrimination; The case law of the European Court is diverse and there are no uniform criteria for indicating discriminatory factors and quite often national legal policy is a higher need than gaps of a discriminatory nature.