UK ‘Rights’ Agency Bars Free Association, Defying International Accords
Leading off: The Labour-led government codifies bigotry, triggering a “human rights disaster.” Trans people win big in a U.S. passport case. The top story lines as the week begins.
by Assigned Media
Radical and far-reaching rules that seek to codify anti-trans bigotry and public exclusion in the United Kingdom appear to directly violate, in part, two major international charters on human rights to which the UK is a signatory.
The Labour-led U.K. government used a late Friday announcement to charge fully through the door to outright discrimination against trans and nonbinary people that the Supreme Court had left ajar in a ruling just days earlier.
Issued as “interim guidance” but using wording that conveys compulsion, Keir Starmer’s government barred trans people from single-sex restrooms and other single-sex spaces. The rules cover all of public life, from workplaces and schools, to hospitals, shops and restaurants.
The agency issuing the rules, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, goes well beyond the UK Supreme Court ruling, which found that the words “women” and “sex” as they appear in the Equality Act do not apply to trans women.
An extreme application: The agency’s rules, for example, take the radical step of seeking to restrict freedom of association, in apparent contravention of two international human rights conventions: Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Though it is tasked with protecting human rights, Starmer’s rights agency unabashedly decreed that groups “should” exclude trans people: “A women-only or lesbian-only association should not admit trans women (biological men), and a men-only or gay men-only association should not admit trans men (biological women).”
“Membership of an association of 25 or more people,” it said, “can be limited to men only or women only and can be limited to people who each have two protected characteristics.”
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which the UK is a party, plainly states: “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of association with others.” The European Convention says the same: “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others.”
The UK is a signatory of both accords and is obligated to protect the rights enshrined in them.
If Labour’s “guidance” is allowed to become law, the UK’s Queer AF said it would be a “human rights disaster” of historic proportions — “the single biggest rollback of civil rights the UK has ever seen.”
Pushing back: After a weekend of protests, queer groups in the UK are mobilizing for legal challenges. Challenges made in international tribunals are lengthy and politically fraught, but have at times succeeded in bringing wide attention to human rights violations like a would-be prohibition on free association.
One group, the GoodLaw Project, which focuses on legal advocacy, drew a direct parallel to the pink triangles of Nazi Germany, saying “Labour’s policy means that for trans people to move through the public sphere they will need, similarly, to identify themselves as trans in an increasingly violent and transphobic world.”
The new UK “guidance” has been aggressively pushed forward by the head of Starmer’s rights agency, who has a record of consistently siding against trans people and conferring with anti-trans lobbyists, Queer AF reported.
Labour’s anti-trans campaign, while buoyed by the notoriously transphobic UK media, drew blistering criticism elsewhere in the world. The columnist Séamas O’Reilly, writing in the Irish Examiner, called the UK’s anti-trans attacks a form of sadism.
The attacks have been made, O’Reilly wrote, “in the name of a ‘feminism’ centered on a small, committed group of active transphobes backed by the entire might of British politics and media, including every misogynist you can name; either because they share this gut-level hatred of trans folks, or simply because it serves their political interests to heap sadism on a vulnerable minority.”
Speaking of pushing back: Late Friday, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the Trump administration from going forward with its anti-trans passport decree, which demands that gender markers reflect a person’s assigned sex at birth.
The judge noted the directive would reverse three decades of precedent, and found that the plaintiffs, seven trans and nonbinary citizens, would likely prevail on their claim that it was “arbitrary and capricious.”
Those words have been used time and again by federal judges in a series of court cases in which Trump has unsuccssfully sought to move ahead with far-reaching anti-trans initiatives like his would-be military ban.
Lambda Legal added to Trump’s court docket on Friday, filing a suit in federal court in Maryland on behalf of trans and nonbinary U.S. citizens, similarly contesting Trump’s passport decree.
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