Discrimination

The Munich District Court ruled last week that rejecting at a club door based on age does not constitute discrimination. A 44-year-old complained, who was already rejected by a security guard at a techno festival in 2017 and asked the organizer for compensation of € 1,000 due to discrimination.

The judge dismissed the complaint on the grounds that the organizer was interested in the selection of his guests.

According to the German Covid-19 rules, a supermarket in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia could only be entered with a shopping cart. The exception was that spouses from one household can share a cart.

Despite the indication that homosexuals are also allowed to marry these days, the security guard did not let the couple in with one shopping cart. Even the deputy branch manager who was brought in was unable to influence the security force and obtain an apology. This was the third incident at Lidl for the couple concerned.

Google announced it would stop allowing housing, employment and credit ads to be targeted to users based on their postal code, gender, age, parental status or marital status, aiming to protect users from unlawful discrimination.

The new rules will build on top of a policy that already prohibits advertisers from targeting users on sensitive areas, categories related to identity, beliefs, sexuality or attributes such as race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

The new policy will go into effect by the end of the year in the US and Canada.

Taking further the federal General Equal Treatment Act, the Berlin government has explicitly outlawed discriminatory actions from public authorities. German federal law from 2006 covered only discrimination in employment and between private citizens, as the German constitution already prohibits public service discrimination.

Lawmakers believe this will help to address issues of systemic racism, along with explicit awareness of many other unlawful discrimination factors in public service - such as gender, age, sexual identity, religion, disability, illness, worldview, education, occupation or income.

The German car manufacturer has raised the rainbow flag outside their Volkswagen brand tower in support of "diversity and tolerance" for the first time as part of the initiative "Wolfsburg diversity and tolerance week" which stands for "a colorful and cosmopolitan community based on solidarity where social origin, sexual orientation and religious affiliation do not play a role" according to the initiators from the organization Aids-Hilfe Wolfsburg e.V..

Volkswagen executive Gunnar Kilian has stated that the company wants to take "a clear stand on respect, equal opportunity, coexistence, equal treatment of everyone – regardless of their ethnic origin, color, sexual orientation, religious affiliation or gender".