UK ranked second worst in western Europe for LGBT+ laws
Despite coming in first place in 2015, Britain has slipped further down the index every year since and is now ranked as the second worst country in western Europe and Scandinavia for LGBT+ legal protections, with a score of only 46%.
Beating only Italy in the ranking, the UK fell seven places this year as a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding transgender people and the Labour Government's subsequent response.
READ MORE: Graham Linehan pleads not guilty to harassment of transgender woman
Rebecca Don Kennedy, CEO of the Equality Network, said: 'It is shameful that having been ranked best in Europe for LGBT+ laws ten years ago, we have fallen so far.
'For our treatment of trans people, after the Supreme Court ruling we are now known as one of the worst countries in the whole of Europe.
'The UK must do better.'
ILGA-Europe — the international human rights group behind the index rankings — noted that, while hate crime law in Scotland improved with the introduction of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, it had little effect on the UK's overall score.
Don Kennedy added: 'Scotland, when analysed separately, has in the past been considered progressive and a beacon of LGBTI+ equality and human rights.
'That seems to be quickly deteriorating – we ask the Scottish Government to act now and do everything they can to improve the lives of LGBTI+ people in Scotland and to not submit to growing anti-LGBGI+ narratives both globally and right here in Scotland.
'We call on the Scottish Government to lead, and to fight for a future Scotland that cares.'
READ MORE: Keir Starmer 'completely rejects' comparisons with Enoch Powell
The top five countries on the index — Malta, Belgium, Iceland, Denmark and Spain — almost double Britain's score, with theirs ranging from 78% to 89%.
The European transgender rights network (TGEU) said: 'Previously a frontrunner on equality, the UK now has a Supreme Court, Prime Minister, and equality body singing from the same hymn sheet as anti-trans campaigners.
'The UK Supreme Court's decision, which defined a 'woman' for the anti-discrimination law, has severely undermined legal certainty for trans people.'
You can click here for the full European Rainbow Index.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
22 minutes ago
- Reuters
US Supreme Court keeps DOGE records blocked in watchdog group's challenge
June 6 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court extended on Friday its block on judicial orders requiring the Department of Government Efficiency to turn over records to a government watchdog group that sought details on the entity established by President Donald Trump and previously spearheaded by his billionaire former adviser Elon Musk. The court put on hold Washington-based U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper's orders for DOGE to respond to requests by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington for information about its operations. The judge concluded that DOGE likely is a government agency covered by the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The brief, unsigned order said that portions of one of the judge's decisions "are not appropriately tailored" and that "separation of powers concerns counsel judicial deference and restraint in the context of discovery regarding internal Executive Branch communications." The court sent the case back to a lower appeals court to narrow the judge's directives. The court's three liberal justices - Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson - dissented from Friday's decision. In a separate case, the Supreme Court on Friday permitted DOGE broad access to personal information on millions of Americans in Social Security Administration data systems while a legal challenge plays out. DOGE has played a central role in Trump's efforts to downsize and reshape the U.S. government including by slashing the federal workforce and dismantling certain agencies. The watchdog group, called CREW, said its intention was to shed light on what it called DOGE's secretive structure and operations. Musk formally ended his government work on May 30 and his once-close relationship with Trump has since unraveled publicly, a split that followed Musk's recent attacks on the president's sweeping tax and spending bill and played out dramatically on social media on Thursday. CREW sued to obtain an array of records from DOGE through the FOIA statute, a law that allows the public to seek access to records produced by government agencies. It sought information on DOGE's activities over its role in the mass firings and cuts to federal programs pursued since the Republican president returned to office in January. The Trump administration contends that DOGE is an advisory entity and not subject to FOIA. In response, CREW sought information to determine whether DOGE is subject to FOIA because it wields the kind of authority of an agency independent of the president. Cooper ruled in April that DOGE must turn over some records sought by CREW and that the group was entitled to question DOGE official Amy Gleason at a deposition. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined on May 14 to put Cooper's order on hold. The administration urged the Supreme Court to act, saying that the judge's orders intruded on the powers of the executive branch and compromised the ability of a wide array of advisers to provide candid and confidential advice to the president. CREW told the justices that siding with the administration in the dispute would give the president "free reign" to create new entities that would "functionally wield substantial independent authority but are exempt from critical transparency laws." In one of his decisions, Cooper said DOGE's operations have been marked by "unusual secrecy." In another, the judge said that the language of Trump's executive orders concerning DOGE suggests that it is "exercising substantial independent authority."
Reuters
31 minutes ago
- Reuters
US must face claims over pandemic ban on residential evictions
June 6 (Reuters) - A U.S. federal appeals court ruled Friday that the United States must face potentially billions of dollars in legal claims over a temporary ban on residential evictions during the COVID pandemic that affected millions of landlords. The Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a 7-3 decision, opens new tab rejected the government's bid to overturn a decision by a panel of judges last year that refused to dismiss claims from landlords seeking compensation over the eviction moratorium. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September 2020 issued a nationwide order halting residential evictions after the expiration of an earlier 120-day directive by Congress. The agency's order, which lasted about a year, focused on combating the spread of the coronavirus. The court ruling on Friday could spur the United States to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. Damages have been estimated at tens of billions of dollars, as rental property owners were blocked from evicting people who were not paying rent. The Justice Department and a lawyer for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Residential rental property owners sued over the CDC moratorium in Federal Claims court, seeking compensation under the U.S. Constitution's 5th Amendment 'takings' clause. They argued the government had taken their property for public use. The moratorium was in place until August 2021, when the U.S. Supreme Court ended the Biden administration policy. A Federal Circuit divided panel last August reinstated, opens new tab the claims against the United States, and the Justice Department then asked the full appeals court to take up the dispute. In a filing in January, the government said the panel decision 'upends over a century of precedent' and said the decision will have 'significant consequences in this case and others.' Lawyers for the property owners urged the full appeals court not to disturb the panel's earlier decision. The government 'merely wants another bite at the apple with the hope of a different outcome,' the lawyers said. The case is Darby Development Company Inc et al v. United States, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, No. 2022-1929. For plaintiffs: Creighton Magid of Dorsey & Whitney For defendant: Nathanael Yale of the Justice Department Read more: U.S. Supreme Court ends CDC's pandemic residential eviction moratorium
Daily Mail
35 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Booze, wood-burners, Sunday roasts... as the list of everyday pleasures targeted by the SNP grows longer, have we EVER been subjected to a more censorious nanny state government?
They've clobbered smokers. Thought – aloud – about criminalising the ownership of cats. Its Fife panjandrums are now leaning on local chippies to slash portion-sizes – in the averred interests of public health: now, SNP surrogates threaten your Sunday roast. The ink had barely dried on the first Scottish Parliament minutes before that first cohort of MSPs had banned fox-hunting and hare-coursing. Passed a whole Act about dog-fouling. Our underemployed, overwaged legislators are still after anyone gasping for a fag - in the latest wheeze, you can now be prosecuted for puffing within fifteen metres of a hospital boundary, even if you are on the other side of the street. Disposable vapes are in their sights too: for years it has been an offence to vape at any Scottish railway station, even on a platform in the open air. No pleasure seems safe from the Nats, from their fatuous efforts to police football chants – indeed, the initial law was so intrusive, and so unworkable, it had to be abandoned. Forget that soothing drink, by the way. 'Minimum pricing,' whacked up again last year, means you're now shelling out more for a litre of sherry than, back in 1999, you had to hand over for a bottle of Famous Grouse. Our English neighbours enjoy cheaper beer than we do. And now the Nats have a real new beef with us. The Scottish Government's Climate Change Committee, wagging a sententious finger, says we should all be eating 30 per cent less red meat. And that farmers – as if they did not have trials enough, with scant profit-margins and over-weening bureaucracy in one of Scotland's loneliest jobs – should rear a third fewer sheep and cattle. Even that shocker has had to jostle for attention with other ridiculous headlines. NHS Fife, for instance, is leaning on the hot takeaway trade to cut the typical portion of, for instance, fish and chips. And the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission suddenly has anglers in its crosshairs. Fishing practices should be reformed, it drones, as fish are 'sentient beings' with 'emotional experiences that matter to them.' It hopes ministers will soon review the law regarding 'actions that occur in the normal course of fishing.' Such a move, panted one newspaper and as if it had just unmasked Lord Lucan, 'could outlaw many aspects of angling such as hooking a fish and removing it from the water.' SAWC does, admittedly, have form. Only in February, it thought about forbidding cat ownership in parts of the country where there was demonstrable predation on birds and small mammals. It would make still more sense to shoot every last bird of prey out of the sky and, if SAWC wants a rough guide, between 1837 and 1840 gamekeepers in forested Invergarry killed 285 common buzzards, 63 goshawks, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles and 18 ospreys. Not to mention six gyrfalcons, eleven hobbies, 275 kites, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kes-trels, 78 merlins, 63 hen harriers and seven orange-legged falcons. The First Minister, of less stern stuff, limply assured the public that the SNP administration had no plans to ban pet cats. Last year, too, the Nationalists were even forced to abandon a crazed scheme to ban wood-burning stoves in new-build houses. It feels increasingly as if you cannot take three strides in what one of John Swinney's predecessors once hailed as 'the best small country in the world' without being lectured, harangued, re-proached and disapproved of. Tobacco, sugar, booze, salmon or that jumbo-sausage supper… ministers have their beady little eyes on us. And, no doubt, others have eyes on them too. It is only fair to point out that this culture of censure, rebuke and righteously rapped knuckles long predates the SNP's 2007 ascent to power. From practically the start, the devolved new Scotland rapidly won much wry comment for eat-your-vegetables nanny statism. After the first MSPs had solemnly voted themselves a com-memorative medal. In 2005, for instance, Nora Radcliffe – Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon, till Alex Salmond toppled her from obscurity into oblivion – called for a ban on the boiling of live lobsters. The Scottish Executive, as it then was, pelted us with posters and raucous TV ads about the horrors of everything from eating too many crisps, through dodgy electric blankets, to the enormity of consigning your Christmas turkey to the fridge before it was completely cold. And, in April 2006 and to widespread trepidation – many journalists hurried up from England, hoping for riots on the streets – Jack McConnell's administration banned smoking in enclosed public spaces. A policy, in fact, first suggested by a Nationalist MSP, Stewart Maxwell. But Scots submitted to it so meekly that one wonders how much it emboldened another First Minister, fourteen years later, to impose all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on our liberties during Covid. At its height, you could not sit down on a park bench, enjoy coffee with a neighbour in your garden or leave your house more than once a day. It was even decreed an offence to venture beyond the bounds of your own local authority. When I in March 2021 had briefly to scamper back to my Hebridean lair, by deserted roads through silent towns, for an armful of Astra-Zeneca, I was so terrified of being stopped and challenged I carried a sort of letter-of-transit from my GP. Meanwhile, our unfortunate children shuffled down school corridors in sweaty masks as – concerned about classroom ventilation – ministers wondered aloud about sawing the bottoms off doors and Nicola Sturgeon tut-tutted that Prince William dared to visit Scotland. Behind this are two dark realities. The first is that, while finally responsible for a host of public services, the Scottish Government (and, by extension, the Scottish Parliament) delivers virtually none of them. Local authorities school most of our children; local health-boards direct primary care and hospitals, and so on. When it finally did have an immediate and grave responsibility, from the dawn of 2021 – vaccinating the elderly and the vulnerable against coronavirus – the Scottish Government made such a laboured fist of things that, quietly and with the deepest tact, Whitehall sent in the army. The second reality is that there is a very old middle-class tradition in Scotland of censuring working-class pleasures. In an era when, for most ordinary people, Sunday was their only day off, clergy insisted on the shuttering of galleries and museums. In a noted Court of Session case – with consequences, generations later, for the Western Isles – it was finally ruled that the good and respectable folk of Burntisland, most conscious of their goodness and respectability, could not ban the Sabbath visits of excursion steamers. In 1875 the Religion and Morals Report for the Free Church General Assembly railed that, to a large extent, 'our farm servants are ignorant, licentious, profane and rude'. What yokels might have thought of Free Church ministers is not recorded. Meanwhile, Presbyterians grew so obsessed with the demon drink that, by the Great War, many congregations celebrated Communion with non-alcoholic wine. And, in 1907, a United Free Church minister assailed a new social phenomenon as 'perfect iniquities of Hell itself,' capped in Glasgow Corporation's 1909 roar about 'the great and increasing evil' it was doing to the city's young men and women. Business ventures 'owned by 'aliens and Roman Catholics,' touting an unnecessary product 'epitomising,' gasped one gentleman, 'the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians.' The target of such ire? Italian ice cream cafés. As if not to be outdone, the Free Presbyterian Magazine warned young Highland lasses, seeking urban employment, of the perils of the white-slave trade. They should not, for instance, accept sweets from strangers. Retreating from such past larks to the latest decrees from those with the rule over us, it is striking how few stand up to logical examination. Take the Scottish Climate Committee's clamour for less beef and fewer cows; the reduced bleating of sheep. This is presumably pegged to three core tenets of tree-hugging faith: that reduced upland grazing will in scant decades see the regeneration of much Scottish forest; that cattle-feed is a wildly inefficient use of grain; and that cows, naturally flatulent, are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The precise figure is, in fact, disputed. But the Committee's lordly loftiness flies in the face of basic realities. For one, about 65 per cent of all the land in Britain can bear nothing but grass. Cows and sheep – hold the front page – eat grass. We cannot. Our cloven-hooved stock will, accordingly, be an essential part of our food economy till the end of time, and the beef industry in particular has for years been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. For another, much of upland and coastal Scotland is too high – or too exposed to salted winds – to bear significant woodland. Life in somewhere like Lewis or Tiree is, as someone once said with feeling, like living on the deck of an aircraft-carrier. Snow can fall on Ben Nevis in any calendar month of the year. And, even were it otherwise, the Climate Change Committee seems to be blithely unaware of the real menace: deer. The deer population on Britain, as Patrick Galbraith details in his rather good book about Brit-ain's vanishing birds - In Search of One Last Song - is completely out of control: two million beasts on the trot, the highest in a thousand years. The ideal on a well-managed Scottish estate is five deer per square kilometre – on some, numbers are at an unsustainable twenty per kilometre. The depredations of muntjac alone have wiped out the nightingale in many parts of England. Deer threaten the survival, too, of black grouse, ptarmigan and the capercaillie. They are, additionally, responsible for many fatal road-accidents; and there is no more ferocious foe of forest than browsing Bambi. But households remain reluctant to buy and cook venison – and, absurdly, much of the venison for sale in Britain today is imported. In any event, most of us eat less red meat these days, not least because it is so expensive: you will struggle to buy a family-sized pot-roasting cut for less than a tenner. And in the Hebrides, well within living memory, it was a rare treat: fish and potatoes all week, with meat (and the related broth as the first course) on Sundays. There are other environmental realities that seem to have eluded the Climate Change Committee. Without cattle, as the Royal Agricultural Society of England has pointed out, 'there would be no dung, which would vastly reduce the presence of dung beetles in their habitat. 'As well as delivering a myriad of ecosystem benefits, such as sequestering carbon into the soil, dung beetle larvae are a key food source for ground-nesting birds. It is estimated that dung beetles save farmers in the UK £367 million per year…' Then we have that NHS Fife obsession: how big is your fish supper? In fact, fish and chips – cooked properly and well – is a remarkably healthy meal. There is, for instance, no added sugar. It is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins B12 and D, and high-quality protein – and less fat than a typical serving of, say, chicken tikka masala or an oil-slicked Chinese takeaway. 'Typically,' assures one authority, 'fish and chips on average have 9.42 grams of fat per 100 grams, while the average pizza has 11, chicken korma 15.5 and a donner kebab a whopping 16.2…' We come to SWAC's vapourings about angling. One rather doubts such solicitude extends to every creature of the earth. Even the Commission's august personages doubtless prefer life without headlice, tapeworms and rats and most, presumably, vaccinate their children. It remains official NatureScot advice to smash dead any American signal crayfish you meet in our fresh waters and, for over two decades, it has been determinedly exterminating feral mink in the Western Isles. Where SWAC may have a point is the dubious practice of 'catch and release.' My own view is that you should only venture out with the rod for fish you can eat and, having caught your salmon and thumped it on the head, you head for home and the deep freeze, rather than hauling in fish after fish, weighing them, measuring them, taking a few snaps for social media and then returning them to the deep. Not forgetting a protracted chat about emotional experiences that really mattered to them. But, in coarse fishing, catch and release is the whole point: we might, perhaps, command barbless hooks, or even the soluble sort decreed in the pursuit of bluefin tuna. The wild Atlantic salmon may not always be with us; the typical Scottish political animal will add to the gaiety of nations for decades to come. Bossy, virtue-signalling, carefully picking its targets, and unconsciously living what Ronald Reagan once mocked as the prevalent tenets in modern statecraft. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it – and, if it stops moving, subsidise it.
