The Election Law promotes women’s participation in political and public life by mandating that every candidates list shall include candidates of male and female gender. There must be at least 40% female candidates. English translation available from RefWorld here.
Employees of state hospitals in Hamburg were granted the right in 1995 to continued employment in case of privatization of the hospitals. In 2000, the cleaning staff were spun off into a separate company which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the state hospitals. Upon privatization in 2005, the right to continued employment was applied only to those employees employed by the state hospitals, not those employed by the wholly-owned subsidiary company.
The Court held that it was in breach of the right to equal treatment enshrined in the German constitution that periods of maternity leave (which affects women only) were not counted towards certain pension benefits whereas periods of sick leave (which affects both men and women) were. English translation of 1 BvR 1409/10 available here.)
The lower court issued an expedited injunction against the petitioner. The petitioner filed, inter alia, a constitutional complaint appealing the injunction, which prohibited him from approaching or contacting his partner and from re-entering the flat he shared with her to protect her from his domestic violence. The Court did not allow the constitutional complaint, inter alia, on the grounds that the injunction did not breach the complainant’s constitutional rights.
The 51-year-old claimant, a female employee, argued that the age limit on her employer’s pension fund discriminated against her based on, among other things, her gender, . The age limit only provided for pension claims for employees who were not older than 50 at the beginning of their employment. However, the claimant had stopped working after the birth of her child and did not return to the work force until she was 51. Her child was already 25 years old at that time and had fully completed his vocational training.
The Court held that it was unconstitutional to require an attorney without earnings to continue to make compulsory pension contributions during time taken off to care for children (up to the age of three years). The Court found that requiring such compulsory pension contributions was a breach of the right to equal treatment enshrined in the German constitution because it disproportionately affected women, who are the parent taking time off to care for small children in the vast majority of cases.
The claimant sued her employer on the grounds of discrimination after a male colleague received a promotion to a management role she had hoped for. The Court decided for the claimant, accepting statistical evidence showing that, while the majority of employees of the employer (69%) were women, no women were represented on the three most senior management levels. This was the first decision of a court accepting such statistical evidence of discrimination. This decision is now only available via subscription service.
This appellate decision overruled the Berlin-Brandenburg Labor Court’s (Landesarbeitsgericht Berlin-Brandenburg) 2008 decision 15 Sa 517/08 which held that the plaintiff was discriminated against in the course of her employment on the basis of her gender. She sued her employer in trial labor court in Berlin on the grounds of discrimination after a male colleague received a promotion to a management role that she had hoped for and for which she considered herself to be equally qualified.
The claimant, a female employee, exercised her right under the Transparency in Wage Structures Act (available here: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/entgtranspg/BJNR215210017.html) to obtain information from her employer about the average salary in the group of colleagues who performed the same or equivalent work as she did as a head of department. She found that her compensation was below average.
The minor applicant, a member of the Hazara ethnic group, illegally immigrated to Austria with her parents and four minor siblings from Afghanistan when she was approximately nine years old. The Federal Asylum Agency of Austria (“FAAA”) denied her and her family’s petitions for asylum. The Asylum Court reversed the denial, finding that the FAAA erred in summarily denying asylum based on the applicant’s statements without considering outside credible reports or sources relevant to the applicant’s asylum claim.
