A Brussels employment tribunal awarded €21,648 in damages to an African-origin woman after she faced discrimination based on her skin colour and age during a job application.
The court ruling, dated 5 May, was published on Unia’s website and garnered attention from various media outlets in recent days.
In 2022, the 34-year-old woman applied for a position at an accountancy firm in Grimbergen through Actiris, the employment agency for the Brussels-Capital Region.
She sent her CV and cover letter, but later received an email from the firm that included a previous internal communication describing her as “not so bad, but black and old.”
The woman was not hired.
She reported the incident to Actiris’s anti-discrimination unit and human rights organisation Unia. However, the accountancy firm denied wrongdoing, arguing it had previously employed “individuals with different backgrounds.”
The tribunal rejected the firm’s defence, noting that the internal email was sufficient to establish a presumption of discrimination, which the firm failed to counter. It could not justify why it had specifically mentioned the applicant’s age and skin colour.
