Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has called for a “fresh start with critics” after the UN rejected demands that the EHRC be stripped of its official accreditation.
The demands, which were led by LGBT advocacy charity Stonewall, would have seen the ECHR lose the accreditation that allows them to participate fully in sessions of the UN’s Human Rights Council, amongst other benefits.
Stonewall said that they sought the review after the EHRC made statements which Stonewall viewed as “anti-trans,” saying that the EHRC had “placed trans people in the firing line,” and that “the EHRC’s attempt to create a hierarchy of human rights in Great Britain is a very real threat to everyone.” Stonewall alleged that the EHRC was focusing on “pleasing a noisy minority of anti-trans activists,” rather than “promoting human rights for all LGBT+ people.”
The root of this fight seems to be a response the EHRC submitted to a recent consultation on banning ‘conversion therapy’ in England and Wales. The EHRC submission said that, whilst they agreed harmful conversion therapy practices should be ended “in principle,” they were “concerned” about certain aspects of the consultation, and about “the proportionality of the proposed measures and risk of unintended consequences.”
Marcial Boo, Chief Executive of the EHRC, has released a statement which reads, “As we launch our new strategy, we are reaching out to organisations that have been critical of the EHRC, encouraging them to put aside past disagreements and to work with us and other like-minded organisations to protect everyone and to achieve a fairer society for all.”
Last year the EHRC withdrawn from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions programme. The programme, which generates roughly 3 million euro a year in revenue for Stonewall, allows companies to work with Stonewall to improve their LGBT policies. Companies that sign up to the programme can be listed as one of the “Top 100 employers for LGBTQ+ people,” on an index which Stonewall releases annually.
In June of last year The Times reported that internal documents they had acquired showed that Stonewall was using the index to “coerce” NGOs and companies to support Stonewalls policies. The Times said that Stonewall had used the index to attempt to force other organisations to lobby on Stonewall’s behalf