I know from experience that access to our human rights is restricted

Now, that sounds new and very interesting, because if this is indeed so, the Scottish people will soon have their full UN human rights entitlement which they were promised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948. This would include their full political and economic rights as set out in the declaration, and certainly the right to determine their own political future without interference from the UK.

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If we had the human rights set out in the declaration and in subsequent UN conventions, then we would have a legal right to organise a referendum on Scottish independence any time the people wanted to have one, and it would be legally enforceable. That was the whole purpose of our petition to the parliament last year which was sabotaged by five MSPs, no doubt with strong support from the UK-inclined civil service.

I suspect, however, that the process will not be as simple as that. One would have thought that when – in the aftermath of the terrible horrors inflicted on Jewish and other people by the Nazis in the Second World War – the United Nations set up a system of human rights, this system should have been available and open to all humans, irrespective of where they came from, as indeed was its perception, but no.

Not long after the initial work from the UN, we had the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Human Rights set up to cover Europeans. I used to think, naively, that these were there help us get access to our human rights, until I was put in a position of having to try and use this legislation. I then discovered that my access to the European Court of Human Rights, which is supposed to be open to each citizen, is only open to each UK citizen if the UK establishment will confirm that the citizen concerned “has exhausted all domestic legal remedies”. And who judges if this criteria has been met? Why, the UK establishment of course. This effectively means that the UK establishment can block any attempt by a UK citizen to get their case before the European Court of Human Rights.

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In the only two cases I know of, both relating to the Skye Bridge tolls, the UK establishment used their power to prevent cases from proceeding to the ECHR on quite extraordinary and meaningless claims.

In my case, for example, they acknowledged that my case had gone as far as it could through the criminal law appeals process, and refused to say if there was any legal option open to me. They then waited until the end of the appeal process and announced that I could have appealed under civil law but had not done so.

Our case on the Skye Bridge tolls from day one was that this was a matter for the civil and not the criminal law. They had refused to accept this for nine years, and were now claiming that I could have appealed to the civil court. This was just a blatant attempt to show us that they had a veto to stop us from having a case heard in the ECHR.

There is no doubt in my mind that the most direct legally sound way to Scottish self-government is through UN human rights covenants, and that this can be achieved through our devolved parliament within the current Scotland Act, because if the UK establishment could have stopped us legally, they would have done so last year, not resorted to sabotage. So we can do it under the new parliament this year.

We must ensure, however, that it is the real UN human rights conventions we are aiming at and not some watered-down European court option which might, or might not, be available to us.

Andy Anderson
Ardrossan

BRIAN Forsyth writes (Mar 24) about the requirement, in some contexts, for “accommodation” or “honest balancing” of the needs of cisgender women and transgender women. That is exactly what the Equality Act 2010 was designed to provide. It said that trans people could be excluded from single-sex contexts that match their gender identity, but only where that exclusion is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. International human rights law says much the same thing. But the Supreme Court ruling last year effectively rewrote that part of the Act.

Since then, accommodation and balance are certainly not what “gender-critical” organisations have pursued. The Women’s Institute have long and happily included trans women members. But after being threatened with legal action last year by a gender-critical organisation, they were forced, against their wishes, to throw out their trans members. A number of branches have chosen to close rather than drop their trans friends.

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Hampstead Women’s Pond swimming group is also trans-inclusive, and its members have voted to remain so. But a gender-critical organisation has taken the London Corporation, which owns the pond, to court, to force it to ban trans women.

These gender-critical organisations are not seeking reasonable accommodation or balance, but to enforce the wholesale exclusion of trans people, whatever others think. It is discrimination writ large.

Tim Hopkins
Edinburgh