ABSTRACT
This chapter explores anti-discrimination policy. It compares the Commission on Human Rights in New York and the OND in Barcelona, focussing in particular on anti-discrimination policy. While comparing the two agencies, this chapter considers the impact of the different legal quality of anti-discrimination policy in the two cities, and the enabling and constraining impact of the law on their implementation. In this respect, the chapter emphasises a trade-off between, in very general terms, the capacity of the Commission on Human Rights to impose remedies and redress classical forms of discrimination enabled by the city’s Human Rights Law on the one hand, and the wider reach of the Office for Non-Discrimination’s anti-discrimination action based on rights. The first part elaborates on the two approaches. The second part looks in greater detail into the categories used by the two agencies to classify their complaints as evidence of deductive and inductive approaches to discrimination characterising the Commission on Human Rights and the Office for Non-Discrimination, respectively, while also offering an overview of the kind of cases the two agencies deal with. The third part reflects more generally on the content of the cases and how they are solved.
