Bringing complaints before the European Commission serves as a basis for raising awareness on the obstacles faced by LGBTI people, and for initiating a formal infringement procedure against a Member State to help ensure its compliance with EU law.

This webinar is for all LGBTI organisations and activists in the European Union. Our speakers and experts will share their experience of bringing cases to the European Commission on discriminatory application of EU law and failure of implementation of CJEU judgments, as well as provide guidance on EU law aspects that can be challenged through the procedure.

The webinar will take place on Thursday, 30 April 2020 between 10:00 and 11:30 CEST.

Moderated by Arpi Avetisyan, Senior Litigation Officer at ILGA-Europe, the panel will host:

• Teodora Ion-Rotaru - Executive Director of ACCEPT Romania,
• Professor Alina Tryfonidou - Professor of Law at the University of Reading, and
• Etienne Deshoulières - Deshoulières Avocats Associés Law Firm.

Contributions from European Commission experts:

• Maria Vilar Badia, Legislative Officer at DG JUST of the European Commission,
• Bénédicte Marquet, Legal and Policy officer at DG JUST of the European Commission, Unit – Union citizenship rights and free movement.

• To attend the webinar, register here in advance.

• If you want to know more about the Coman judgement and the complaints procedure please consult ILGA-Europe’s blogpost or contact ILGA-Europe Senior Litigation Officer Arpi Avetisyan arpi@ilga-europe.org.

• Read more about our work on strategic litigation.

About the speakers:

Teodora Roseti-Ion-Rotaru

Executive Director of ACCEPT Romania

Teodora Roseti-Ion-Rotaru is the Executive Director of ACCEPT Association. She joined the organisation in 2013, as a volunteer. Throughout her time at ACCEPT, Teodora coordinated programs, the relationship with the media, partners and the community, and led notorious public campaigns, chiefly the national communication regarding the Coman case (2016-2018) and the boycott campaign regarding the national referendum to ban same sex marriage in the Romanian Constitution (2018). A graduate of the European Administrative Affairs program at the College of Europe (Bruges), where she specialized in interest representation and Europeanization, Teodora is a convinced federalist and fights illiberalism and shallow Europeanization in eastern accession member states through activism for democracy and human rights.

Professor Alina Tryfonidou

Professor of Law at the University of Reading

Professor Alina Tryfonidou joined the University of Reading as a Lecturer in September 2011, after being a Lecturer in Law at the University of Leicester from 2007 to 2011. She taught European Law as a Visiting Tutor (2005-2007 and 2010-2011) at King’s College London. Professor Tryfonidou obtained her LLB (2001), LLM (2002) and PhD (2008) from King’s College London and is an Associate of King’s College (AKC) since 2008. She is a non-practising member of the Cyprus Bar since 2003, a Fellow of the Centre of European Law at King’s College London since 2007, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) since 2016. In 2004, Professor Tryfonidou completed a traineeship at the European Commission in Brussels and in 2010-2011 she was an Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) Visiting Fellow in London. Professor Tryfonidou’s research interests focus on EU free movement law and the protection of LGBT+ rights.

Etienne Deshoulières

Deshoulières Avocats Associés Law Firm

Founder of the Deshoulières Avocats Associés Law Firm, also Research Associate at the Law Research Institute of University Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris I and Professor at the University Panthéon-Assas Paris II. He is currently involved in 60 LGBT cases before the French and European tribunals.