PRESS RELEASE: Justice, what justice?

A quirk of fate means that Press for Change, the organisation campaigning for the restoration of normal civil rights to transsexual people in the UK, will be holding its Conservative Conference fringe meeting this year just yards from where the Society of Conservative Lawyers are gathering to debate “Access to Justice”.

The two events are both taking place at the Lampeter Hotel in Bournemouth, on Thursday October 10th, and are scheduled to get underway at 12.45pm.

“It was completely unplanned”, says transsexual rights campaigner Christine Burns, “but I’m delighted by the irony”.

“The problems endured by Britain’s transsexual population for the last quarter century were created entirely by one bad divorce judgement in 1970, which has served neither society nor people like me ever since.
It was a flawed judgement then, and I hope that the meeting next door won’t stop at merely examining access to the machinery of law.”

“Our problem has been the surreal attitudes that operate once a transsexual woman or man gets into the court room”.

“Nobody wants to have to shop abroad for justice, but it’s significant that every transsexual litigant since that awful judgement has ended up going to Europe in the absence of justice nearer to home”.

The principal speaker at the Press for Change meeting has direct experience of presenting transsexual rights cases in the English Courts. Madeleine Rees, of the Birmingham-based solicitors group Tyndallwoods, has helped dozens of transsexual people bring grievances to court in the last few years, including the landmark P vs S and Cornwall County Council case, which has provided the basis now for sufferers of this medical condition to fight against unfair dismissal and discrimination at work.

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