Age and disability differential treatment in France – Contrasting EU and national court’s approaches to the inner limits of anti-discrimination law

Abstract

Illegitimate differential treatment in France puts European Union anti-discrimination law into perspective. Although French judges and the French legislature have transposed the directives on legitimate differences of treatment based on age and disability which include justifications to discrimination in employment, the French judiciary has also shown it can adopt a higher standard of scrutiny than the Court of Justice of the European Union, taking into account the specific plight of younger and older workers. This development is meaningful because this implicitly highlights how civil law systems can grasp, in a more incisive way, the scope of antidiscrimination law.