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In Vera Egenberger v Evangelisches Werk für Diakonie und Entwicklung eV [2018] EUECJ C-414/16 , the Grand Chamber of the CJEU has reaffirmed that, in cases where religion or belief organisations impose a Genuine Occupational Requirement when recruiting staff, that requirement must be both genuine, legitimate and justifiable.
Background
In November, we reported Advocate General Tanchev’s Opinion in the case of Ms Vera Egenberger. She had applied for a job advertised by the Evangelisches Werk für Diakonie und Entwicklung [EWDE], an auxiliary organisation of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland [EKD], a private law institution pursuing exclusively charitable, benevolent and religious purposes. The successful applicant was to prepare a report on Germany’s compliance with the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The duties included public and professional representation of the EWDE; and the advertisement stated that candidates should be members of a Protestant Church or of a member-Church of the Cooperative of Christian Churches in Germany. When she failed to get the job, she lodged a claim with the German Labour Courts for payment of damages of around €10,000, arguing that she had been rejected because she does not belong to any religious community and that she had been discriminated against on the basis of belief.
Questions referred
In Egenberger , the Bundesarbeitsgericht (Federal Labour Court) had submitted a series of questions to the Court of Justice, as follows:
“1. Is Article 4(2) of Directive 2000/78/EC [ the Equal Treatment Directive ] to be interpreted as meaning that an employer, such as the defendant in the present case, or the church on its behalf, may itself authoritatively determine whether adherence by an applicant to a specified religion, by reason of the nature of the activities or of the context in which they are carried out, constitutes a genuine, legitimate and justified occupational requirement, having regard to the employer/church’s ethos?
2. If the first question is answered in the negative:
In a case such as the present, is it necessary to disapply a provision of national law – such as, in the present case, the first alternative of […]