Test-Achats
A 2011 Court of Justice ruling imposing unisex pricing, holding that a true correlation does not suffice to price a protected characteristic.
The Test-Achats ruling of March 1, 2011 struck down the derogation in Article 5(2) of Directive 2004/113/EC, which allowed member states to maintain rating differentiated by sex. It imposed unisex pricing for every contract concluded from December 21, 2012. The Court did not dispute the correlation between sex and claims experience, which is real, established and considerable in several lines. It held that a true correlation does not suffice to justify treating a person according to a class they did not choose, once the treaty makes equality between women and men a value rather than a parameter. The ruling moved the debate from statistical truth to legitimacy, and actuarial science has no instrument to settle that question. Its practical reach goes well beyond sex alone. The reasoning applies to any criterion that is correlated but unchosen, which is why it is invoked today in debates on genetic data, origin, and geographic proxies.
Since December 21, 2012, the effective date of the Test-Achats ruling of March 1, 2011, sex remains a legitimate actuarial datum in technical provisions and reinsurance, but it has ceased to be a rating datum on the insured's bill.
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