Synopsis
Stereotypes are beliefs about groups of people. Some examples, taken from human rights case law, are the notions that 'Roma are thieves', 'women are responsible for childcare', and 'people with a mental disability are incapable of forming political opinions'. Increasingly, human rights monitoring bodies including the European and inter-American human rights courts, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination voice concerns about stereotyping and warn States not to enforce harmful stereotypes. Human rights bodies thus appear to be starting to realise what social psychologists discovered a long time ago: that stereotypes underlie inequality and discrimination. Despite their relevance and their legal momentum, however, stereotypes have so far received little attention from human rights law scholars. This volume is the first one to broadly analyse stereotypes as a human rights issue. The scope of the book includes different stereotyping grounds such as race, gender, and disability. Moreover, this book examines stereotyping approaches across a broad range of supranational human rights monitoring bodies, including the United Nations human rights treaty system as well as the regional systems that are most developed when it comes to addressing stereotypes: the Council of Europe and the inter-American system.
About the Author
Eva Brems joined the Ghent University Law Faculty in September 2000 as the first holder of the then newly created chair of Human Rights Law. Before that, she studied law at the universities of Namur (candidat 1989), Leuven (licenciaat 1992) and Harvard (LL.M 1995). She was a PhD researcher at the University of Leuven (1995-1999) and a lecturer at Maastricht University (1999-2000). At Ghent University, she founded the Human Rights Centre. Her research interests cover most areas of human rights law, in European and international law as well as in Belgian and comparative law, with a particular emphasis on the protection of the rights of non-dominant groups and individuals. She has a keen interest in multi- and interdisciplinary research. She has been an activist in the board of several Belgian human rights NGOs, including as the chair of the Flemish section Amnesty International (2006-2010), and she was briefly active in politics (as a member of the Belgian federal Chamber of Representatives, 2010-2014).
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