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12 STAATKUNDIG GEREFORMEERDE PARTIJ v. THE NETHERLANDS DECISION The State’s and the SGP’s position therefore raises the question whether an exception to equal rights for women, as set out in Article 7 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, can be accepted in relation to the right to stand for election in a case like the present, in which a political party whose political aims are grounded on its religious convictions, based on these convictions deny women nomination as candidates for election to public elected bodies. In view of what follows, this question must be answered in the negative. 4.5.3. The basic rights of freedom of religion and freedom of association – and of course also freedom of expression, which, for the matter now in issue, has little if any independent significance next to the basic rights just mentioned – guarantee that citizens may unite in a political party on the basis of a religious or philosophical conviction and may express their conviction and the political principles and programmes based thereon within the framework of that party. In a democratic state governed by the rule of law, however, those principles and programmes may only be given practical effect within the limits posed by laws and treaties. 4.5.4. The general representative bodies represent the entire population without making distinctions among the citizens of whom it is made up. They form the heart of the democracy and a guarantee for the democratic content of the State. The rights to vote and to stand for election are essential to guarantee the democratic content of these bodies. Both Article 4 of the Constitution and Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights taken together with its Article 2 and, as far as women are concerned, Article 7 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women guarantee to everyone, without any distinction based on gender, the right to elect members of these bodies as well as to be elected to them. The said provisions mention the right to vote and the right to stand for election in the same breath, thus expressing that in a democracy they are each other’s necessary pendant, since the voters must be able to determine for themselves who among them should be eligible. 4.5.5. Seen thus, since the possibility to exercise the right to stand for election goes to the core of the State’s democratic functioning, it is unacceptable that a political formation in composing its lists of candidates violates a basic right that guarantees the elective rights of all citizens, regardless of whether such action reposes on a principle rooted for that formation in its religious or philosophical convictions. To that extent, the prohibition of discrimination set forth in Article 4 of the Constitution, Article 25 taken together with Article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and, in the particular context of the present case, Article 7 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women outweighs the other basic rights in issue. It follows from the above that the SGP’s violation of the basic right, guaranteed by the Constitution and the said treaties, to be allowed to stand for election on an equal footing with men is not justified by the fact that its view of woman’s calling and place in society is directly rooted in its religious conviction. Admittedly the SGP cannot be denied its conviction and the civil courts are not even competent to express an opinion on the question whether that conviction is of greater or lesser importance in the faith of the members of the party, and admittedly a democratic legal order requires tolerance in relation to opinion rooted in religious or philosophical convictions. All that, however, does not prevent the courts from finding the way in which the SGP puts

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Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij v. the Netherlands

Judgment

Question Presented: Whether religiously affiliated parties can exclude women from running as candidates on the grounds that forcing the party to host women candidates violates its freedom of religious expression, as it believes women are unsuited for public office?

Alleged Acts: The Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij of the Netherlands, a conservative religious party, violated the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women by unfairly preventing women from running for office.

Procedural history: The case initially started in 2005 when a coalition of human rights organizations and pro-women's interest groups sued both parties in the Regional Court of the Hague. The original group of petitions alleged that the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP) violated the equal rights of women to stand for election by denying them the right to run in the party, and alleged that the Netherlands violated those same rights by allowing the SGP to submit candidate rolls for Dutch elections with those restrictions in place. The case against the SGP was dismissed for a lack of standing as the Court held that women had the option to run for election in other political parties. However, the High Court ruled that the Netherlands had violated Article 7 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women by subsidizing the SGP and providing it state funds for its election campaigns. The Netherlands appealed this decision to the Court of Appeal of the Hague in December 2007. The State argued that since women could still join other political parties and stand for office in the Netherlands, its financial support of the SGP did not violate the rights of women to stand for office. The Court of Appeal upheld the lower court’s decision requiring the Netherlands to cease funding the SGP until it allowed women to run as candidates, and also reversed the lower court’s decision that held the SGP did not violate the rights of women. Instead, the Court of Appeal held that the SGP’s exclusion of women did violate women’s Article 7 rights. The Court held that while the SGP had a right to run candidates that espoused beliefs associated with the party (e.g., women are unfit for office), it could not prevent women from running as candidates on its electoral ballots. The SGP appealed the Court of Appeal decision to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, which in 2010 upheld both decisions by the High Court. The Supreme Court found that the SGP violated the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women by excluding women from its candidate lists, and ordered that it must allow women in the party to run as SGP candidates within the Netherlands. Dissatisfied with the Supreme Court’s holding, the SGP appealed the case to the European Court of Human Rights to try and reverse the lower court’s decision.

Summary: Prior to this case, the Netherlands did not require parties standing for national elections to conform to gender quotas and put forward certain percentages or ratios of male and female candidates on their tickets. Thus, during the 2012 Dutch parliamentary elections, the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP) submitted candidate lists to the state that did not include any female candidates standing for election. The SGP held that it had the right to exclude women based on its religious beliefs and principles. The SGP described itself as “confessional political party firmly rooted in historical Dutch Reformed Protestantism,” a conservative strain of Christianity. The party’s religious beliefs dictate that women are inherently unsuitable for political office, so the party claimed that their right to freedom of religion protected them from any requirements to allow women to run as candidates. Thus, the party instituted a policy that fully banned women from running for political offices in the Netherlands as members of the SGP. After the SGP submitted its candidate lists to the state, a coalition of human rights and pro-women’s interest groups jointly sued the SGP and the Netherlands in the Regional Court of the Hague over the SGP’s candidate lists and accused both parties of unfairly preventing women from running as candidates. After lengthy proceedings through Dutch national courts, the Supreme Court ultimately required the Netherlands to force the SGP to allow women onto its candidate rolls. Both the SGP and State were dissatisfied with the Supreme Court’s decision. As the Netherlands has a civil law system, courts have the authority to order remedies that neither party sought (in this case, ordering that both the SGP allow female candidates and that the State refrain from funding parties like the SGP until they comply with the Supreme Court’s order). Thus, to challenge the Court’s holding, the SGP sued the State in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to determine whether the SGP had a right to exclude women from its candidate lists based on the religious beliefs of its members. The SGP also sought to determine whether the State could provide state funds to parties that violated the Convention, as the Dutch Constitution – in contrast to the Convention – did not forbid the State from doing so. Both parties hoped that the ECtHR would overrule the Supreme Court’s opinion, allow the SGP to submit candidate lists without women, and allow the State to fund the SGP and parties like it.

Conclusion: The ECtHR ultimately ruled that the protections afforded to women by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women outweighed the concerns for the petitioner’s freedom of religious belief. The Court held that promoting gender and sexual equality within government and democracy overrode concerns for religious liberty when constructing party lists. The SGP was ordered to create balanced candidate lists or it could not stand for election, and the State could not provide state funds to any political party that violated the Convention.

Legal Issue(s)

Gender

Applicable Law(s): The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Articles 7, 9, 11; Constitution of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Articles 1, 4, 6.

Region: Europe and Eurasia

Country: Netherlands

Language of Decision

English

Court: Human Rights Court

Election Type: General

Date of decision: Jul 10, 2012

Geolocation

Latitude: 52.074582533390135

Longitude: 4.324035588651896

: Geolocation

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Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij v. the Netherlands

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