Hypocrisy about ‘rights’
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) recently moved to secure a High Court injunction banning peaceful protest outside its Vauxhall offices. The aim was clear, to halt a Trans Kids Deserve Better protest encampment calling out the Commission’s anti-trans guidance. Instead, the court firmly rejected the move.
On 3 June 2025, Justice Sheldon dismissed the application, stating the EHRC’s landlord failed to prove a ‘strong probability’ of future trespass or encampment. Campaigners celebrated the decision:
‘Simon Natas of ITN Solicitors, representing campaigners, warned that such so-called “persons unknown” injunctions: “have become increasingly common … their impacts on freedoms of speech and assembly are far-reaching”’.
The EHRC’s website proclaims that ‘Article 11 protects your right to protest’. Now, as Good Law Project points out:
‘The EHRC was created to protect our rights. Now it’s trying to quash peaceful demonstrations.’ It’s hypocrisy laid bare.
This is arguably alarming given that the protest highlighted the EHRC’s recent interim guidance, issued hastily after the UK Supreme Court’s April ruling defining womanhood and EHRC Commissioner Akua Reindorf’s call for a ‘period of correction’ for trans people, believing they had ‘been misled for years’.
The backlash was immediate: the interim guidance prompted Labour to scrap its national women’s conference for the next two years and extend consultations, forcing the EHRC to delay updates to its code of practice.
Last month, ‘thousands’ rallied in London and Edinburgh to oppose the guidance. In Glasgow, activists scaled the EHRC building, displaying a banner reading ‘End Segregation, Trans Liberation’ — a direct challenge to its policies.
This affair lays bare a telling reality: the EHRC, ostensibly set up to be a rights champion, now resorts to court injunctions to silence criticism, specifically from the trans community. Claims of institutional independence crumble when it attempts to suppress dissent aimed directly at itself.
Rights under capitalism are conditional. The EHRC’s failed injunction is significant, not because it defends protest, but because it pushed legal limits on dissent and lost. Socialists can never trust courts or quangos. Genuine rights including freedom of assembly, equality, and dignity, rest only with mass collective working-class control. The EHRC’s attempt to ban protest is an attack on that principle. Fortunately, this time they failed.
A.T.