 Fyddwn gwirionedd willen o'r ddegwydd yma. Rwy'n edrych o'cheso bellach eich ddegwydd yn cyf wielddol. Felly rwy'n ni'n cymryd ar y dyfodol, ond iddo yn gweithio chi'n gallu ei wneud ei ddechrau. Rydym y mwyaf arall yn gweithio chi'n gweithio. Felly, dwi'n cael ei gwaith o'r ddegwydd yma, wrth gyd yn ei wneud y prys i'r llyn dioled o'r cwestiynau wrth gweithio ymdwyno cwsau drefnol ymddwynyledo, mae gennym eich haws o'r cychwynwr oeslog o gyfnodol mae gennymwyr. Yn y ffwrdd, rydw i ddim, ond nes gydag gyda fadeb ymddangos cymdeithasol a'r ddaw na y ddweud ymddangos cyreig o uneddiadau ymddangos yn y peidio. Byddwch am y peidio yn y cwestiynau cyngor yma. Felly rydw i'n fydig i ddim i'n gyfrifiad o'i frwn o'i ychydig i archifnodol o'r ymddangos cyffredig yma i'n canodau i'r Uneddu. a dyna y Pethau 3 yn ychydig yw yw'r gyfweliadau, sy'n ddod i fynd i'r ddweud i'r gyfweliadau. Ac ydych chi'n ddiwedd i ymddangos o'r pryd ymddangos, a'r prysgau cymrydau ymddangos, ac mae'n gyfweliadau sydd wedi ymddangos, mae'n gwybod o'r cyfweliadau, mae'r Llyfr yn ymddangos ymddangos sydd wedi'i gyfweliadau yn ymddangos o'r cyfweliadau ymddangos, The Ddal says that you're the needs that I must carry out, so the partnership puts me at a disadvantage as a Christian who doesn't support gay marriage and therefore, you must justify the disadvantage that you put me in and the court does justify. It's framed as an indirect discrimination claim but the16 gracias Gwbl Mly Journax says, you're requirement on me that applies to everybody that you must giveありがとう130 to anybody who comes to couples Iel'r gwybod, iawn i'r ddysgrifatig. Mae'r ddysgrifatig yn siaradau'r ddysgrifatig. Ac mae'n mynd i, mae'n ddysgrifatig wedi cael ei gwybod hefyd yn gyflawni'r ddysgrifatig. Mae'n gwybod i gwybod i'r ddysgrifatig a phrygwch yn mynd i'r ddysgrifatig. Felly ei fod yn byw i ddysgrifatig o'r ddysgrifatig a chymwyllt. Mae'n gofynu, mae'n gofyn i'r ddysgrifatig o'r ddysgrifatig. a bod yn ysgrifedd y byddwch ond yn maen nhw'n HUF, ond bydwch yn castr ym mhwysgffodol. Mae'n bydwch yn gweithio'r ffordd, mae mae'n ffordd o glen sausageio'r sgdd, mae'n gweithio'r rhan o gwgeithio'n sgdd y ffraeg i'r byddy, mae'n bethau proffortio'r bydwch yn ei wrthog bwysig i bobl yw, oedd yw'r bydwch yn gweithio o gweld rhoi'r byddo, mae hyn yn gallu'r gweithio ar y byddwch yn gweithio. I'm requested rather than required each year to come along and meet first year undergraduates and we tend to have some wine there. If I said I'm not serving that wine, I think it would be disproportionate of my employer to say we're not employing you as an academic because you won't serve wine for one Thursday evening in the year. Of course it would be disproportionate and so my confidence claim would be supported. So indirect discrimination sort of does the trick. The proportionality concept has got an inbuilt flexibility and ability to pick up nuance in the case and it can take into account if it's a public sector, is it not public sector, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it works quite well. The idea of a duty of accommodation is going to also be incorporated in within our proportionality equation and we can see that starting to infiltrate. So Lady Hale mentioned it in the Hall and Bull case saying actually in order to assess whether or not it was a proportionate response to turn down the request to insist on the requirement, we can take into account whether or not the employer was prepared to do a reasonable accommodation. So actually it's already sort of, we've already sort of got it, but in a rather indirect way. And you also see that in the most recent court of justice cases from the EU. In that bitter case they said one of the issues in relation to proportionality is whether or not there was an attempt to or whether they could have thought about accommodating the request. So a duty of accommodation is sort of folded in within our indirect discrimination claim. So that's the sort of, it roughly works. We can test, I'm not really looking at the outcomes in the case, I'm just thinking about structures if you like and as a structure we can see that it works. But there are some downsides to it. One is the concept of the individual claim. So the whole thing, the problem within direct discrimination is that in a weed at the court of appeal decided that you have to be part of a group. And we looked at that earlier this morning, the group claim. And therefore if you're just one then you may not be able to bring your claim because you can't show there's a group of you who are disadvantaged. Now in the paper I set out my argument why I think that they don't need to follow that route anymore if we use an indirect discrimination claim. I think following the OEDA decision at the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act, which means that we have to interpret our law to comply. I think it's quite plausible to interpret our indirect discrimination law to comply. Indirect discrimination law says that something was put or would put a person at the same belief at disadvantage. And it seems to me that the would puts isn't in the conditional tense. You just add in the words would put if there was anybody, persons who shared that belief. That argument was put to the Court of Appeal and they rejected it and said it stretches the meaning too much. But it seems to me under the Human Rights Act we can stretch the meaning. And so I think that's a counter argument. The case of the bar said sort of seems to have looked to it but actually they do concede in it that they didn't hear argument on it. So I'm holding out with a bit of hope that we can still make that argument if it actually came to it. The other thing is that it's rare that nobody else shares the belief. The problem for OEDA was an entirely practical one. I don't think the legal team had necessarily thought about the point. And so they didn't come with evidence of where's her group. And so the Court just said well you didn't identify with it. They didn't say it would have been impossible for you too. It just happened that you haven't. And I think it was a convenient way of disposing of her case without having decided. So I still think there's a way out of that sort of dead end on groups. The other problem there with indirect discrimination is that it's not very clear. You have to be quite a well-schooled lawyer to get that. This is actually an indirect discrimination claim. Somebody says can I ask my employer to opt out of serving wine at the freshers do? You've got to say well actually yes you probably can. Now let me explain it's called indirect discrimination. It's complicated. It's not clear on the face of it. And people don't know that they have that right. There's also a problem with indirect discrimination which is that it has run the danger of levelling down a big quality law. If we take it as an equality strand. So indirect discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, sex, race is pretty strict. It's quite hard to justify indirect race discrimination. You're certainly not going to be able to say clients don't like it or it's expensive. Think of how much money we expect employers to spend to support women who are pregnant. We have really high standards of what we expect employers to do in order to protect the quality rights of their swap on those other grounds. And I'm not sure there's an appetite for us to respect so much for the accommodation of religion at work. And so if the court starts to say well yeah actually it would have been a bit expensive wouldn't it buy a new fridge for this person who needs a separate fridge for their non-mute. The employers might, we might end up saying that we can justify the what we now know is indirect discrimination and refusing to do that. If we start to allow cost to justify for example or other colleagues not liking it or whatever it is. That could have to pay, that could lead to levelling down of indirect discrimination standards elsewhere in our quality framework. So the pros in favour of the indirect discrimination approaches it sort of works and the downside is it's not clear. There's a potential problem over individuals and it runs the risk of cross-contamination with the rest of equality law which has a slightly different buy-in by society I think. So that leads everyone to the question would reasonable accommodation be the answer would that solve these problems. If we have a think about what happens in the states where they do that, how does it work? Well the US and Canada both have a duty of accommodation. The paper explains quite how it works. But the basic idea is that religious individuals can ask for an accommodation of religious practice and the employer must accommodate it up until the point it reaches undue hardship. A lot of people think this is the answer, it avoids the individual, it's clear and you separate it off from the rest of equality law by you don't get cross-contamination because it's not like the rest of the equality grounds. It's now and it's got its own separate category. But the argument that I make in paper is that actually the framework is only as strong as the protection for the right to reasonable accommodation is only as strong as the courts understanding of what's reasonable and what is undue hardship. So if we take the United States example their level of hardship is really quite low you can very easily they sort of give with one hand a right to accommodation and they take it straight back again by saying as soon as there's a problem it's undue hardship and your case sort of dissolves. That's not, it's a little bit too glib to summarise it as that. You do have to have a hardship, you can't just come up with a hypothetical hardship and there must be economic hardship and not just sort of spiritual hardship. So there's a place called Townley Engineering where the employer wanted to run the business along Christian lines and argued that they used to send out gospel tracts with their outgoing mail and print Bible verses on their invoices and things and the employer said if they were to accommodate an atheist in their workplace by excusing him from attending the weekly services it would cause a sort of spiritual hardship to the organisation and that wasn't accepted. It had to be an economic hardship so it does have some content this right. But in the case, the Crownsworld Airlines case in Parsons which sort of sets the standard this was somebody who wanted to be allowed some time off for religious observance and it was going to mess up their shift system and other workers would have been upset by it and the court said actually if we accommodate your shift pattern we're going to put other people at an inconvenience and they won't like it and that was enough hardship. So basically it's pretty a low level hardship. Second case they said the fact that the employee could identify lots of other ways they could have accommodated him wasn't enough. That doesn't give you an automatic right to be accommodated. The fact that the employer would like that can identify lots of other ways that they could make this work doesn't get you over any sort of hurdle. As I say, a fairly weak standard implied in the States. If we turn to Canadian case law we find a better standard so they have some statements that say things like if you've got to accommodate it, if it's possible to accommodate it then you should. But it still says unless it causes undue hardship. So a couple of writers have got I think a bit over excited about potential for indirect for reasonable accommodation on the basis of this line that says you've got to accommodate it if possible because the second bit of the sentence says unless there's undue hardship so we're back to the same issue. There's still this sort of indeterminate bit for the court to decide was that undue hardship. But the Canadian courts have put a little bit more of a content to it. It has a substantive and a procedural aspect. The employer needs to have thought about it and show they've thought about it as well as just the question of whether it was reasonable. And employers must do more than merely show there's just some impact on their business. It can be argued that they need to tolerate a certain amount of inconvenience in order to accommodate the religion. So what we have is two jurisdictions using the reasonable accommodation model with quite different, not quite different standards of protection which proves my contention that it's not the model that is important, it's not this panacea that if we just introduced the accommodation suddenly all of our issues are going to disappear and that this is the answer. Despite that I would never claim that the duty of accommodation would solve the problems. But that then leads to the third part of the paper that looks at having set out that stall if you like. Where do we go? Do I think that the duty of accommodation would help? Quite a few people do. There's been quite a lot of groups suggesting that we should go down this route. The equality and human rights Christians have said that they're not favouring it. I was involved in some of that so that might not be surprised that they were on that mission but they were very very clear in the work that I did that they didn't want us to reach a conclusion and it was their conclusion that they weren't going to press for the introduction of the duty of accommodation. But the European Union funded project Religari comes out in favour of the duty of accommodation and the European Parliament has suggested it and there's a certain amount of European discussion around it as an idea so there are people getting behind it as an idea. As I've said I think in practice it doesn't solve the problem. We'll just move the debate from when is it proportionate to how much hardship is undue or what is reasonable. So I don't think it's worth making the change just for that reason. What other reasons might there be to make the change? Well they're certainly easier to understand. It's obvious from the face of the right that what it is, the duty of accommodation seems to me and it would be quite much easier to explain to people. There's a procedural issue about burden of proof that also changes things instead of having to say I've got to identify a neutral rule and then show the disadvantage and show that it's disproportionate. You just ask and then the employer's got to come back and answer. So in that sense it's much easier and I think it would be easier for individuals to claim. You haven't got to show a group who just say I don't want to work on Tuesday afternoons and the employer's going to have to decide what they're going to do about that. Whether you're into the reasonable, this could be the question of whether you're misguided that your church should be meeting on Tuesday afternoons but you can have an individual one-off claim. So in that sense it's easier. But that very point leads another set of people to not like this as an approach because it's sort of almost too easy if you like to claim. There's the sense that it would be easier to claim because you're not accusing your employer of doing anything wrong. So if you bring in indirect discrimination claim, you've already started off on a fairly aggressive track haven't you with your manager? You're discriminating against me by not letting me store my whatever it is in the fridge. Is it much more difficult conversation to have? I wonder if we could have a conversation. I need to be able to have this special shelf in the fridge to store this or I can't work on Thursday evening serving drinks. Can you accommodate me? It's a much easier conversation, less confrontational. But as has been pointed out by people here, one of the other problems is that it possibly leads to a sort of assumption that the answer should be yes, that we should let's fit the difference and maybe gives too many rights to individuals, religious individuals to expect change at work to be in the workplaces of the community around. And I'll keep it, it might give stronger rights to people with sort of obdurate beliefs than to people who don't have, you know, the stronger your religious grouping is and the stronger your religious rules are, the more accommodation you suddenly become eligible for, which may people may not feel too comfortable about. So, there are those who really feel that it's not the right move. And the other argument that I look at in the paper is a concern that if we keep within the equality framework, we've got quite a well theorised and understood and quite a little case law already. You know, we've got a big background that we're working from when we're developing what our thinking about how much conscience claims should be accommodated at work. If we set off into this other right to reasonable accommodation, we're not entirely sure necessarily the legal basis for it or the theoretical basis for that. It could be based on article nine, right to religious freedom, but we lose some of the richness of the thought, I think, and the jurisprudence that we have within our indirect discrimination law. And I think that would be a pity. And the other thing that's just to sort of finish is that it occurred to me that some of the people who argue for a right to reasonable accommodation, this links to levelling down, some people want a right to reasonable accommodation to stop the levelling down. This religion stuff is going to bring the protection for gender down, so we let's siphon it off and then we can legitimately give it less protection than these other categories. Other people want reasonable accommodation because what they see is this is the answer to get us better protection. So what we really want is a right to reasonable accommodation, so we'll get our accommodations. And so I then decided that we might end up with a duty of reasonable accommodation being brought in by a sort of coalition of chaos where we have these two groups actually aligned together and end up introducing it. But actually from utterly and totally different perspectives because it doesn't just introducing a right to reasonable accommodation doesn't tell us what we're going to do with it, doesn't give us any content. We can say that duty of accommodation is a duty of accommodation like Brexit is Brexit, but we don't know what that means. So actually a move to introduce a duty of accommodation, we can actually get quite a lot of people to agree to but why they want it and what it might lead to is absolutely unclear and potentially an introduction of it. One of the quality and human rights reasons, commissions reasons but not doing it I think was that we would just have to develop another whole set of new case law to tell us what its content was. And we wouldn't get the consistency and coherence that some people feel it would create. So I think although I still sit slightly on the fence over whether we should make that move, my overall feeling is that it wouldn't necessarily create consistency in any greater clarity than we currently have. So I don't commend to you the introduction of a duty of accommodation but I'm open to argument on it. I'll stop there. Thank you.