Council of Europe commissioner voices concerns after April’s supreme court ruling on legal definition of a woman
Transgender people risk being excluded from many public spaces as a result of the recent UK supreme court judgment and must be protected from discrimination, a human rights expert has said.
Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, said he had concerns about the climate for transgender people in the UK after April’s supreme court ruling that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex.
Interim advice issued after the judgment by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in effect banned transgender people from using facilities according to their lived gender and allowed services to request birth certificates to ensure single-sex services were protected. Its formal guidance, understood to be similar, was submitted last month to Bridget Phillipson, the minister for women and equalities and also the education secretary, who must decide whether to accept it.
In a letter to the respective chairs of the UK parliament’s joint committee on human rights and the women and equalities committee, O’Flaherty said there was a tendency in the UK to see the human rights of different groups as a “zero-sum game”.
