The Council of Europe may claim to be dedicated to the defence of human rights, democracy and the rule of law, but the human rights organisation has recently championed a new cause: the spread of gender identity ideology, The Spectator reports.
A document released earlier this month by the Council’s Commissioner for Human Rights should cause alarm across the continent. The document, “Human Rights and Gender Identity and Expression,” leaves no one indifferent. The main recommendations are alarming, such as:
“Recognise the identity of transgender children and school-aged students in the school environment, regardless of their legal gender/sexuality, including allowing them to use their names and pronouns, dress as they wish and participate in sports and other activities in accordance with their gender identity and expression.”
Zealotry is not limited to children. The Commissioner has stated that “national policies governing participation in sports must assume that transgender people can participate in accordance with their gender identity.” Meanwhile, we are told that everyone should be able to enjoy “sanitary facilities” according to their “gender identity.” The madness extends, of course, to prisons, where “unless they agree, trans people should in principle be held according to their gender identity.”
Who else might be asked where they’d like to be housed once they’ve been sentenced to prison? These are special rules for special people. This document – all 122 pages of it – puts transgender people on a pedestal and glosses over the fact that exceeding our rights infringes on the rights of other groups. After a visit to the UK in 2022, the commissioner stated that “she believes that arguments where the protection of transgender people is undermined or incompatible with women’s rights and acquired advantages must be firmly rejected.”
Of course, there is a conflict here, even over the meaning of the word “woman.” But in this regard, the commissioner has bought into the ideology. She relegated women to a subclass when she wrote: “Ensuring that transgender women enjoy the same protections as all other women expands the scope of those protections and does not diminish them for cisgender women.”
So who is this commissioner and why should the UK pay attention to her document? Dunja Mijatovic was elected Commissioner for Human Rights in 2018 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. She previously worked for the Communications Regulatory Agency in her native Bosnia and Herzegovina before becoming the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) representative on media freedom. Her CV is impressive, and her work for the Council of Europe covers the challenges faced by women, children and vulnerable groups, especially those affected by conflict and displacement, as well as the human rights implications of the military conflict in Ukraine, according to The Spectator.
But at the same time, she seems completely oblivious to two fundamental problems caused by this unfounded idea that human beings have some kind of psychic gender identity that takes precedence over biological sex. Firstly, if women cannot protect the boundaries of their gender identity, some men will take advantage of it. Secondly, vulnerable children can all too easily fall prey to social media promoting the nonsense idea that they can choose who they grow up to be – male or female, or perhaps anything else.
Thanks to campaign groups and brave politicians, there is a sense that Britons are realising that none of this is true. Our society is beginning to confront the dangers, standing up for women’s rights and protecting children, but also defending the legal rights of transgender people from harassment and discrimination.
Although the UK has left the EU, it is still a member of the Council of Europe. Graduation documents, not to mention PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) resolutions, directly affect London. Back in 2016, when self-identification of legal gender – another of Mijatovic’s recommendations – first surfaced in a debate in the House of Commons, Maria Miller MP cited an earlier Council of Europe resolution to justify the demands her Women and Equalities Committee was making of the government.
More recently, PACE put the UK on the naughty step alongside Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey in 2022 when it passed a resolution protesting against “hatred of LGBTI people in Europe”. The accompanying report gave the reason: “In the UK, anti-trans rhetoric claiming that gender is immutable and gender identity is invalid is also gaining unwarranted and alarming credibility.”
The fact that sex is immutable and gender identity is just an unprovable and unverifiable idea is supposedly considered hate. The truth may hurt, but it cannot be denied, The Spectator reports.
The grand project continues. On 16 April, the PACE committee’s report “Freedom of Expression and Assembly of LGBTI People in Europe” will be discussed in Strasbourg. It calls on member states to support Pride marches and campaigns to raise awareness of LGBTI rights and diversity. Meanwhile, of course, there is war in Europe and constant threats to our way of life.
The UK can simply ignore Council of Europe resolutions, but one wonders why we continue to be members of an organisation that seems to have its priorities turned upside down. It’s not just membership fees – this year the UK’s contribution to the Council of Europe budget was €45,475,779 (£38,986,157) – but its presence lends credibility to these issue papers, reports and resolutions.
Change is possible in the organisation. Mijatovic’s term as human rights commissioner is coming to an end. She will be succeeded by Michael O’Flaherty, an Irish human rights lawyer, who will take over the reins on 1 April. O’Flaherty was once Chair of Applied Human Rights and Co-Director of the Human Rights Law Centre at the University of Nottingham, so he seems to know the UK well.
Perhaps O’Flaherty can learn from the return to reality we are seeing in the UK and knock some common sense into the corridors of Strasbourg. Europe deserves much more than gender identity ideology. But if he is unwilling or unable to make a difference, then perhaps the Council of Europe is another European institution that the British should abandon.
