Basu v. Germany and Muhammad v. Spain: Room for improvement in the Courts first judgments on racial profiling

On 18 October 2022, the Third Section of the Strasbourg Court, decided two cases dealing for the first time with the question of whether and how far racial profiling by public authorities constitutes a violation of the Convention. The outcome is a mixed one. Whereas in Basu v. Germany the judges held that the facts constituted a procedural violation of Article 14 (prohibition of discrimination) in conjunction with Article 8 (right to private life), no violation was found in Muhammad v. Spain. The comparative and critical analysis of these two judgments provides interesting indications on what to keep and what to improve for similar future cases.