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The year 2000 marked the birth of EU anti-discrimination law as a field in its own right, with the adoption of two major Equality Directives. They extended the prohibition of discrimination with five additional grounds and expanded the material scope of equality regulation. Having reached its eighteenth birthday in the year 2018, EU anti-discrimination law can now celebrate its adulthood and deserves a bird’s eye exploration of its achievements, failures, and prospects. The present Article provides this exploration by zooming in on these twin Directives, as well as on the “new” grounds of discrimination planted therein, namely race and ethnicity—the grounds introduced by the Race Equality Directive—religion, sexual orientation, age, and disability—the grounds introduced by Framework Equality Directive—and the related jurisprudence of European courts. It first outlines the genesis and main stages in the development of EU anti-discrimination law, followed by a discussion of major normative and practical themes emerging in EU anti-discrimination law after 2000, such as the personal and material scope of the Directives, new forms of discrimination, mechanisms to counteract discrimination, and the proceduralization of EU anti-discrimination law.

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Case C-528/13, Léger v. Ministre des Affaires sociales, de la Santé et des Droits des femmes; Établissement français du sang [2015] ECLI: EU:C:2015:288 (Fourth Chamber).In the case of Léger commented on, the Court of Justice of the European Union dealt with a blanket ban on blood donation for men who had sexual relations with other men (MSM) in France. The Court found that such restrictions can be justified in light of specific epidemiological context and scientific knowledge available in Member States. The judgment, therefore, sheds lights on the boundaries of public health justifications, discrimination of gay and bisexual individuals, as well as the rising scope of EU sexual risk regulation. The present annotation argues that the Court has undermined the principle of non-discrimination and shows how the matter of blood donations should have been treated instead as a prerequisite of active sexual citizenship.“[T]he sanguine substance is intimately tied to both identity and public culture. Blood is a metaphor of life and of death; it fosters insider and outsider relations; it has economic clout and emblematic significance; these primal fluids are far from natural, organic, or self-evident, being imbued with cultural connotations reflecting imagined connectedness, tentative securities and demonstrable anxieties.”Jefrey A. Bennet