Today, the Trans Advocacy and Complaints Collective and the Trans Exile Network have made a joint submission to the Directorate General of Human Rights and Rule of Law regarding the UK Supreme Court's judgment in the For Women Scotland v. Scottish Ministers case of April 2025.
This submission details how the case has exposed the UK's non-compliance with the judgment made in the European Court of Human rights case of Goodwin v. UK (2002). This non-compliance did not begin in April 2025. The Supreme Court has made clear that the Equality Act was written in 2010 to refer to sex as 'biological sex', leading to ongoing violations of transgender people's Article 8 privacy rights that the Goodwin judgment set out to protect. As such, the UK has never been in compliance with the judgment, and the monitoring of the judgment was therefore closed prematurely in 2011. Lord Hodge gave a press interview on 12 September to the Times in which he admitted that the effect of the FWS case was that trans people had never had the rights they were led to believe by the State to have had. Those purported rights were the basis on which the case of Goodwin was closed and enforcement ended.
We have called upon the Committee of Ministers to follow the precedent in similar cases of ongoing non-compliance in judgments that had previously appeared resolved, such as in FCB v. Italy (1991) and Finucane v. UK (2003). We have requested that the Committee re-open the enforcement process against the United Kingdom and resume monitoring of execution of the judgment in Goodwin v. UK case until the UK government has appropriately reached compliance.
Released jointly by Trans Advocacy and Complaints Collective and the Trans Exile Network 14 October 2025.
