Ms Eweida, you may recall, is the British Airways employee who wanted to wear a cross on a necklace over her uniform so that others could see it. She considered that that was a religious belief. Over-simplifying, doing what she wanted to do meant a breach of her employer’s dress code. Ms Eweida complained that, amongst other things, she was the victim of an act of indirect discrimination.
The test of indirect discrimination is now to be found at Equality Act 2010, s. 19. The constituent elements of the test are:
- A provision, criterion or practice (“PCP”) must be applied to the claimant;
- The respondent must apply it (or the Tribunal must be satisfied that they would apply it) to people who do not share the claimant’s protected characteristic (in this case, holding the belief);
- The PCP “puts, or would put, persons with whom [the claimant] shares the characteristic at a particular disadvantage”;
- The PCP puts or would put the claimant at that disadvantage; and
- The respondent cannot show it to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”.
In the domestic proceedings Ms Ewieda failed at the third hurdle. She could not establish that there were others who shared her particular belief. This is often referred to as the requirement for a “group disadvantage”. Solitary disadvantage, the Court of Appeal found, was insufficient. Denied a domestic remedy, Ms Eweida went to the European Court of Human Rights. Again, rather over-simplifying, the ECtHR decided that the wearing of a crucifix in the manner proposed by Ms Eweida amounted to a manifestation of religion falling within Art 9(2) of the Convention:
Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
The Court decided that the interference with the manifestation was not, in the particular circumstances, proportionate. The UK should have protected Ms Eweida’s right to manifest her religion and had failed to do so.
Whilst the reasoning was clear it left unaddressed a very significant question. The claim had not failed because the Court of Appeal had decided that the PCP could not be justified; it failed because it could not be shown to have had the necessary indirectly discriminatory effect. The question of justification did not arise. So was the effect of the ECtHR’s decision that element 3 of the statutory test was to be regarded as incompatible with Article 9.
The Court of Appeal has now addressed this question in its decision in Mba v Mayor and Burgesses of the London Borough of Merton. Mrs Mba wanted to obey the Fourth Commandment and refrain from working on Sundays. The Council needed to provide care 24 hours a day and seven days a week to those living in the children’s home at which Mrs Mba worked. Having accommodated her desire not to be rostered on Sundays for a period, the Council decided that it could no longer continue to do so. Following an unsuccessful grievance, Mrs Mba resigned.
It was accepted that the requirement to work Sundays was indirectly discriminatory. The argument was focussed on issue 5 above: whether the justification defence was available. There was no dispute that the Council had a legitimate aim so that the argument was focused, narrowly, on the question of proportionality. It was not a case, therefore, directly concerned with what one might call “the unresolved Eweida question”.
The Employment Tribunal had, in assessing proportionality, taken into account three specific factors. Only one matters for present purposes: the Tribunal had taken into account the fact that sabbatarianism was not, in its view, a “core component of the Christian faith”. A lot of Christians work on Sundays.
Christians might take the objection that judging what religion requires by what adherents actually do is a misguided exercise. We are all sinners. The Court focused on a rather different issue: whether the number of people affected was relevant to justification.
Maurice Kay LJ decided that that the Tribunal had erred in its approach to justification. It should not have been asking how many Christians were affected. It should have been looking at the extent of the impact on sabbatarians, i.e. those who shared Ms Mba’s particular belief. Once one was satisfied that others were affected adversely (so as to jump hurdle 3), the number of those affected was not something that was relevant to the assessment of proportionality. He specifically did not place reliance on either Article 9 or Eweida which he considered to be a case that was “entirely fact sensitive”.
Elias and Vos LJ took a different approach – one that depended upon the impact of Article 9. Patrick Elias (whom I adore with a near religious fervour) tackles the unresolved Eweida question head on. He says the “group disadvantage” requirement (ie, hurdle 3) cannot be read down. Reconciling the domestic legislation with the Eweida decision will, therefore, either take a differently minded Supreme Court or legislation. Article 9 could be used, however, to determine how the proportionality question should be answered. The effect of Eweida was that:
It does not matter whether the claimant is disadvantaged along with others or not, and it cannot weaken her case with respect to justification that her beliefs are not more widely shared or do not constitute a core belief of any particular religion.
Both Elias and Kay LJJ took the view that the smaller the group that shared a claimant’s belief the easier it should be to accommodate it. If number of adherents was a relevant issue, therefore, it had the opposite effect to that which the respondent might have supposed.
With all three judges deciding that the Tribunal had erred in law, did Mrs Mba win? Nope. It was decided that since there was in practice no way of accommodating Mrs Mba’s beliefs, the outcome would have been no different even if the Tribunal had adopted he correct analysis.
Sean Jones QC