Advancing EU equality law in Italy: Between unsystematic implementation and decentralized enforcement

The EU Equality Directives represented a key turning point in the field of anti-discrimination law in Italy. However, the Italian law-maker failed to implement the Directives systematically, and this generated confusion about their interpretation and application. This also affected the participation of collective actors. With the aim of understanding whether EU equality law has facilitated collective actors’ access to courts, the paper examines the role that they have played in the anti-discrimination cases brought before the Court of Justice of the EU. In Italy, collective actors participated in a limited number of preliminary references, mostly in the field of discrimination on the grounds of nationality. The work of collective actors, both inside and outside the courtroom, has been crucial in creating a decentralized form of enforcement of EU equality law. Through litigation and campaigns, collective actors contributed to the full implementation of EU anti-discrimination law, filling the gaps left by the Italian law-maker. The paper concludes that, on the one hand, EU law introduced important tools to enhance protections against discrimination in Italy; but, on the other, the unsystematic transposition of EU law created some obstacles to the protection of migrants from discrimination and to collective actors’ access to courts.