Gay Humanist Coordinates New European Group

KENILWORTH, 31 OCTOBER 2002 — The Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) has welcomed the appointment of one of its Dutch members, Dr Kees Waaldijk, as coordinator of an important new lesbian and gay rights group created by the European Commission.

On 24 October 2002, the Commission awarded the contract for establishing a European group of experts on combating sexual orientation discrimination to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands where Dr Waaldijk is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Legal Studies.

The group consists of 15 independent legal experts, one for each member state, and Dr Waaldijk will be its coordinator, assisted by the Italian lawyer Mr Matteo Bonini-Baraldi. Other members of the group will be legal academics from universities in Seville, Leicester, London, Louvain, Paris and Berlin, plus several practising lawyers, including the Swedish Ombudsman for Sexual Orientation Discrimination.

GALHA Secretary George Broadhead said: “Kees Waaldijk has been a member of our group since 1987. He has spoken at our London public meetings and our weekend gatherings. He has been very active in promoting lesbian and gay rights in Europe and helped get the same-sex marriage legislation enacted in the Netherlands in 2001. We wish him, and the other members of the group, well with their work.”

The group’s main task will be to inform and advise the Commission (mostly through an annual comparative report) about the implementation of Directive 2000/78/EC on equal treatment in employment. This directive (based on the new Article 13 in the EC Treaty) requires all 15 member states to enact legislation against sexual orientation discrimination by 2 December 2003. So far only eight member states have such legislation in place (Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden). Therefore the impact of the directive will be felt most in the other seven (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom), and eventually in the ten candidate member states.

The contract for the group is for one year, but may be renewed for up to five years (under the Community Action Programme to combat discrimination of 2000). An increasing number of legal materials collected by the group will be found in the online database of the Center for Research and Comparative Legal Studies on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.

More information about the European Group of Experts on Combating Sexual Orientation Discrimination and its members can be found at http://www.meijers.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?c=98.