While the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has built a rich body of case law on equality over more than fifty years, identifying and analysing these judgments has often proved difficult, even for experienced researchers and practitioners.
To address this challenge, the Academy of European Law (AEL) at the European University Institute (EUI) has launched a new and improved CJEU Equality Law Database: an open-access, user-friendly resource that makes the Court's equality jurisprudence more accessible, searchable, and easier to understand.
Developed by Senior Fellow Claire Kilpatrick (EUI and Queen’s University Belfast) and Jeff Miller (University of Memphis), the database brings together all CJEU equality cases from the first Defrenne case in 1970 to the end of 2024. It currently contains 513 cases and covers all prohibited grounds of status discrimination in EU law, including sex, race and ethnic origin, age, disability, religion or belief, and sexual orientation, as well as cases involving multiple grounds of discrimination.
Reflecting on the project, Claire Kilpatrick said: “The CJEU Equality database is an example of the EUI at its best. The idea for it came from a Working Group in the Law Department on EU discrimination law and it has benefited from ongoing input from several generations of researchers and Faculty as well as essential institutional support from the Academy of European Law. It is an open resource for all to transmit knowledge and generate questions about EU law’s contribution to tackling discrimination in Europe.”
Designed for researchers, students, legal practitioners, judges, policymakers, and anyone interested in EU equality law, the database responds to a significant gap in existing legal research tools. Unlike the official CJEU database, CURIA, it enables users to carry out precise searches by discrimination ground, legal source, referring court, Member State of origin, lawyer, Advocate General, and other criteria. It also makes it possible to identify cases involving interventions by equality bodies and NGOs and to trace developments across different strands of discrimination law.
A key feature of the database is its simplicity. Users do not need advanced technical or data-management skills to navigate the resource and conduct comprehensive searches.
The database was developed with the support and input of many colleagues and collaborators, including Yamam Al-Zubaidi, Gráinne de Búrca, Hanna Eklund, Lilla Farkas, Virginia Passalacqua and Raphaële Xenidis.
The new database was presented at the ICON-S conference at University College Dublin at the end of June, as part of two panels convened by Gráinne de Búrca and Claire Kilpatrick on the theme "What's Happening to EU Equality Law?"
The CJEU Equality Law Database is freely accessible to all users at: CJEU Equality Law Database