Tougher transgender guidance for schools is unlawful, Sunak told

Well, no. It's up to states how they comply with international obligations.

So, for example, the right to life implies that countries must have laws that prohibit murder. That doesn't mean that UK law that prohibits murder can never change. It's just that change must remain consistent with the Convention and its case law - otherwise it will be a breach of international law.

So if we decide, for example, that some of our distinctions between murder and manslaughter are outdated, remedying that is probably fine. If we decide that actually murder should be decriminalised if there is a full moon, or if the victim is named Sebastian - that law would be unlawful in international law terms.

So changing the GRA would be permitted, provided that the legal right to change gender (free from some of the constraints that the Court has since ruled to be violations of Article 8) remained.

The point is that scrapping the GRA entirely, with nothing to replace it, would be a breach of convention rights. And if the thing that replaced it was significantly weaker, that would also breach convention rights (since the GRA is already at the weaker end of what the ECHR requires).

Declaration of intent, or actual exiting of, the ECHR would unleash to tsunami of all tsunamis, incl trade war with EU as No Deal is activated, and likely sanctions from US.

Is that true? Do people not have the right to say that they believe or don't believe in gender? What is wrong is compelling others to participate in your belief. So people shouldn't be compelled to use wrong-sex pronouns for example if they don't believe in gender.

The problem is that AFAIK this question hasn't been tested in the courts yet, so it's still relatively unclear as to exactly how far gender critical people should be expected to accommodate other beliefs in the workplace and/or schools, etc from a legal perspective.

And the issue with Sunak trying to make the guidance immune to any possible legal challenge is that he is trying to achieve the impossible as the law isn't clear on these points and there will inevitably be legal challenges from one or more sides of the debate regardless of what the guidance says.

But we all need the government guidance to start with, in order to settle the legal issues over time. The legal challenges are a necessary part of untangling this whole mess.

Because if this is the case then I've changed my mind and I think we should leave ECHR (I don't think it is though?)

I don’t dismiss the argument that to be part of the ECHR hide-bounds us to their established and accepted gender ideology

So in a vote I guess people would have to decide which way to jump

So if a law is passed in response to an ECHR judgment then we are stuck with that law until the end of time, no matter how obsolete it has become and no matter what the unintended consequences?

Can that be right? 🤔

But that wasn’t the decisive issue. There’s a whole other part of the judgment on Article 8 rights. And the court did not just find a right to equal pensions or marriage or anything else - it explicitly established a right to legal gender recognition.

But of course we don’t just need to focus on Goodwin - the right to gender recognition has been reaffirmed by the ECHR in many subsequent cases, including very recent cases.

Wow, yeah just re-read equality act and other attributes of sex could envelope sex presentation, i.e. appearance. So I wonder if growing hair out from boy's length to girl's length qualifies.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/7

i thought the GRA was brought in not because there is a moral right to a legal sex change, but because ECHR said to the UK gov that they were discriminating against transsexual people because they didn’t have the same rights as others, at a time when there was no same sex marriage or civil partnerships and there were different state pension ages for men and women.

Now that there is same sex marriage and everyone has the same pension age, if someone wants to ‘live as the opposite sex’ in their view then that’s fine and obviously they should be able to do so without discrimination. But why (legally speaking) does the UK need to offer a legal sex change if the justifications made for it have been removed legally? Why not rely on equality act protections to prevent gender non conforming people being discriminated against and repeal the GRA?

But we're straying a long way from the topic of this thread. GRA has nothing to do with schools guidance or the PC of gender reassignment.

Yes it was.

https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng-press?i=003-585597-589247

And this part of the judgment looks highly questionable with 21 years' worth of hindsight:

No concrete or substantial hardship or detriment to the public interest had indeed been demonstrated as likely to flow from any change to the status of transsexuals and, as regards other possible consequences, the Court considered that society might reasonably be expected to tolerate a certain inconvenience to enable individuals to live in dignity and worth in accordance with the sexual identity chosen by them at great personal cost.

The applicant claimed a breach of Article 12 (the right to marry).

From the judgment:
95. The applicant complained that although she currently enjoyed a full physical relationship with a man, she and her partner could not marry because the law treated her as a man.

The UK government could have complied with article 12 by legalising same sex marriage.

Full judgment here if you've got some time to spare.
https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-60596%22]}

Theoretically Parliament could.

The Government could not however. That means civil servants can’t draft the legislation or do any of the usual processes to secure its passage. Doing so would be contrary to international law and so prohibited by the Ministerial and Civil Service codes.

So the UK could repeal the GRA, then someone could take this to the ECHR as a breach of their human rights? Is that how it works? (IANAL, obviously.)

International law isn’t set out in legislation. It is set out, in this case, in the ECHR and its case law which I linked to upthread.

But Goodwin wasn’t decided on those specific issues. The Court has consistently refused to find a right for gay couples to marry, so it would be pretty odd for them to find a right to gender recognition to facilitate two people of the same biological sex marrying.

And the principles in Goodwin have been reaffirmed in many much more recent cases. The right to legal gender change is still very much part of the extant ECHR jurisprudence (in fact it has broadened in the last 20 years).

Repealing (or weakening significantly) the GRA would break international law.

Can you post a link to this legislation?

I haven’t posted repeal the GRA but others have.

Although I do think we have an issue around divergence. As international law takes one path and we may want to prioritise women and girls and sex based rights, yes we have a fracturing of approaches

I can’t willing subscribe to gender ideology even if every nation signs up to it. I find it so damaging for women.

I get it’s problematic and difficult but I’d want conversations around what happens next due to the divergence rather than not have any divergence at all.

We could be one of the few countries that retains sex based rights. I don’t look to say NZ or Canada and think that is a good outcome for women and girls.

The Goodwin case in 2002 did not establish that some means of legally changing gender must be made available. The requirement was that the male applicant should be allowed to marry their male partner.

A law allowing same sex marriage would have complied with this requirement. We now have this, so the GRA is redundant for this purpose.

There was also an issue around the different pension age for men and women, but this now the same for both sexes in the UK, so not relevant.

In my previous link you'll see that some countries which have legal gender recognition still require sterilisation. They are still in the CoE.

The GRA was a solution to the breaches of rights found in Goodwin. Legal recognition as the opposite sex is not a right in itself.

We now have equal marriage, equal pension age and the GDPR which robustly protects everyone's private data. The GRA is obsolete. It's no longer necessary in order to protect the rights that were found to be breached in Goodwin.

Sorry if I got your view wrong. You were responding to a poster who was talking about scrapping the GRA and you didn't correct them, so assumed that was your view.

If you don't want to scrap the GRA, fine. There's no particular ECHR issue at play.

But if you did want to, or wanted to weaken it to the point that it was no longer consistent with the ECHR, then that couldn't be done while we remain in the ECHR.

There is a practical difference between not taking active steps to comply with an international obligation, and taking active steps to contravene an international obligation.

Ministers and Civil Servants are prevented from doing anything that breaks the law. Including international law.

Repealing (or weakening significantly) the GRA would break international law. The only way it would not break international law is if the UK were to leave the ECHR - so until that happens, UK ministers and civil servants would not be able to progress the legislation to do so (at least not within the terms of the Ministerial and Civil Service Codes).

Well yes, none of us have an absolute right to express our beliefs in the workplace.

That's just a statement of the law as it stands.

Have a think about the logical implications if the right to express beliefs in the workplace was absolute.

The European Convention on Human Rights applies to the 46 member states of the Council of Europe. According to this report from the ECHR last year, only 38 of them had a legal or administrative procedure for legal gender recognition, so this is not a requirement to be a member.

https://coe.int/en/web/sogi/-/new-report-on-legal-gender-recognition-in-europe

Actually you are the one not quoting very well.

This was my post

It does seem the GRA unleashed all this

If you want to quote a post that states repeal you’ll need to scroll again and find someone else.

On the ECHR if we diverge to the extent women and girls are deprioritised then I think we should question that. If that means they reassess then good. If not I’ll consider what stance I’d take.