Deep Sea Isopod wrote:
Sikhs should be allowed to wear their ceremonial daggers - known as Kirpans - to school and other public places, Britain's first Asian judge has said.
The school was found guilty of indirect discrimination under race relations and equality laws.
Bullshit! He's playing the race card.
This is NOT discrimination, because ALL of the kids are banned from carrying knives.
As befits my alias, I'll take the role of devil's advocate.
The issue is not as cut-and-dried as you imagine.
An early example of indirect discrimination was the enactment of a law that prohibited people from sleeping under the bridges spanning the Seine. The law applied to everybody, and as such was indiscriminatory in the formal sense, but we all know that in practice it was a law that only applied to the poor. Many clochards were arrested, but never anybody by the name of Rothschildt.
The modern concept of indirect discrimination developed from a court case in 1969 involving an Italian, Ugliolia, whose time served in the military was not acknowledged by his employer in Germany, which in turn affected his rate of pay adversely. The defense argued that no discrimination took place because the relevant employment law stipulated that while only service in the
German military qualifies for being considered in the matter of pay rates, it is applied to everybody and anybody who has served there. The defense lost its case. The court finally decided that, while Ugliolia's pay rate was based on an apparently formally neutral measure, the fact that (1) he could not by law have served in the German military, even if he had wanted to and (2) a significant amount of his working life had been taken up by conscription just the same, he was being materially discriminated against simply for the fact that he was
not German. It was indirect discrimination, but discrimination just the same.
The concept has been applied to other areas since. Sir Mota Singh is probably right at law. You just cannot tell when the quality of reporting is piss poor, and it seems the BBC News Service is no exception in this case. It took me quite some time to dig out the legal justification for an Australian court outcome where someone was convicted of possessing child pornography because he had a cartoon depiction of Bart Simpson fucking his sister. The sensationalistic reportage simply did not bother explaining how the magistrate was doing no more than applying the law as it stood. I suspect that this article is doing something similar.