Fair procedures have long been a topic of great interest for human rights lawyers. Yet, few authors have drawn on research from other disciplines to enrich the discussion. Social psychological procedural justice research has demonstrated in various applications that, besides the final outcome, the manner in which one’s case is handled matters to people as well. Such research has shown the impact of procedural justice on individuals’ well-being, their acceptance of unfavourable decisions, perceptions of legitimacy and public confidence. The ECtHR has confirmed the desirability of these effects in its fair trial jurisprudence. Thus far, it remains unclear to what extent the guarantees offered by Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to a fair trial) coincide with the findings of empirical procedural justice research. This article aims to rectify this and uncover similarities between the two disciplines.

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National equality bodies (NEBs) must provide independent assistance to victims of discrimination in complaints about discrimination. As the EU Directive 2000/43/EC only introduced a minimum programme, there is great variety in design at the national level. In this article, the focus lies on the out-of-court approach of the Belgian NEB (Unia) which is founded on dialogue with the involved parties. Based on semi-directive interviews with 18 persons who reported discrimination and hate speech, the factors that contribute to their satisfaction with the assistance procedure of the NEB are explored. This satisfaction is approached from a socio-psychological perspective based on the relational model of procedural justice which implies that people care about a fair procedure because of the message it conveys to them about their relationship with the entity enacting the procedure. As established in prior research on informal dispute resolution, it was found that the quality of their interaction with the staff members at the NEB played a great role in the assessment of the procedure.

In Belgium, Muslims have been affected by an increasingly hostile climate in which Islamophobia prospers. The need for further research into the gendered dynamics of Islamophobia in a Belgian context has been flagged, as the majority of complaints are made by women. In this contribution, the focus lies on to the narratives of the women who encounter this in their daily lives. Twenty-two Muslim women who decided to report their discriminatory experience to the national equality body were interviewed. Based on their lived experiences, this qualitative study aims to provide an in-depth description of the way in which Muslim women encounter discrimination in order to establish which “treatment, circumstances and behavior are perceived as discriminatory.”

In November 2017, after receiving multiple complaints of sexual harassment, the Flemish Radio and Television Broadcasting Organization (VRT) terminated its collaboration with one of Flanders’ most popular TV personalities, Bart De Pauw. What followed was an explosion of opinions from both well-known and ordinary persons. The focus of this article is on the latter: Facebook users commenting on newspaper articles. To gather information about their legal consciousness with respect to the scandal, their comments are analysed using critical discourse analysis. The term legal consciousness refers to the ways in which ‘the law’ is invoked to evaluate and define certain behaviours that occur outside of a legal framework. Legal consciousness is apparent in the comments of social media users with references to elements of procedural justice: the presumption of innocence, to (the absence of) the right to a defence, or to the absence of any evidence. Despite the fact that the women in question have not made a claim in conventional judicial institutions, their complaints are still evaluated within such a framework. The conducted analysis seems to support the paradox identified by Gash and Harding: that law (or rather perceptions thereof) stands in the way of the objectives of an awareness movement and encourages victims of sexual abuse to remain silent (2018). In this context, it appears that commenters are plagued by ‘himpathy’, with a fixation on the harasser’s fall from grace whereby procedural rules are merely used as a decoy. A remarkable finding of this study is the total reversal of victimhood that takes place. It is found that the case at hand clearly illustrates that seizing control of the narrative is part of male dominance, even more so when the alleged perpetrator is popular and powerful.