Mick Hartley

Michael O’Flaherty, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, has addressed a letter to the UK Parliament expressing concern over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling and what he described as the “current climate for trans people in the UK.” Janice Turner in the Times:

No one bears more blame for gender ideology capturing public institutions and the global erasure of women’s rights than Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights. It was he who convened in 2006 a private meeting of NGOs, lawyers and LGBT activists in Indonesia which drew up what became known as the Yogyakarta Principles.

Key among these was the idea that biological sex as a legal and political construct should be wholly replaced by gender identity. No one at Yogyakarta raised for a second the impact upon women or girls, and yet its precepts trickled down through the UN and human rights bodies into national governments and transnational institutions like the International Olympic Committee.

It is because of O’Flaherty that rapists could be housed in women’s prisons and female athletes made to compete against males. British feminists have been unpicking the ensuing mess for over a decade, culminating in April’s Supreme Court ruling that sex is biological reality. So O’Flaherty’s last remaining weapon is to accuse Britain this week of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights, which is still suffused in the misogyny of Yogyakarta.

See also this statement from the Athena Forum:

As one of the main drafters of the Yogyakarta Principles, a non-legal activist document that seeks to erase sex as a category in law and policy, O’Flaherty has long blurred the boundaries between human rights and ideological advocacy. His intervention now appears less as a defence of rights than as political pressure on independent courts and legislators. The UK Supreme Court ruling reaffirms basic legal clarity and women’s sex-based rights. Attempts to undermine such rulings through moral panic and behind-the-scenes lobbying mark a worrying misuse of institutional power.

From Athena direstor Faika El-Nagashi:

Mr O’Flaherty’s letter reads less like a defence of human rights and more like a political intervention. He uses the authority of his office to promote transactivist narratives that have no legal basis. Rather than addressing the real hostility faced by women defending their rights, O’Flaherty misrepresents judicial decisions and democratic debate as threats to human rights.