On 22 October 1981, the European Court of Human Rights held, by fifteen votes to four, that the existence of law in Northern Ireland prohibiting male homosexual acts was a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The judgement was made in a case brought to the court by Jeffrey Dudgeon, a gay Belfast shipping clerk. Exactly forty years later, Alistair Lexden opened an online conference, organized by Professor Paul Johnson of York University, one of the country’s leading academic human rights lawyers.
The first thing I have to do—and I do it with great enthusiasm—is to pay tribute to Paul Johnson for having conceived the happy idea of marking the 40th anniversary of Jeff Dudgeon’s Strasbourg triumph, and for organising this event with the thoroughness which seems to be his middle name. No one has a greater commitment than Paul to advancing the cause of LGBT rights, and also to honouring those who suffered grievously in past generations. Legislation is before the Lords at the moment, which, thanks to amendments crafted by Paul, will enable many more people and their families to wipe away the stains left by hateful laws that have now been repealed.
Not the least of the benefits for which we have to thank Paul is his publication of Jeff’s moving first-hand account of his life as a gay man in Belfast in the 1970s, and of the Strasbourg case itself. It is readily available for all time in Paul’s book, Going to Strasbourg, published in 2016.
Paul has referred to my interest in Northern Ireland, which was rather greater forty years ago than it is now. Lacking a diary, I cannot recall my work then in detail. But I am clear that in the Tory ranks at Westminster, the case for extending the 1967 Act to Northern Ireland stirred no interest whatsoever. It never came up in my conversations with Airey Neave, with whom I worked for two years before his murder; though, as a man of great humanity, I do not think he would have been unsympathetic.
The Thatcher government, formed in 1979, specifically ruled out action to diminish the oppression of the criminal law on gay people in Northern Ireland. That is the simple, central fact that needs to be borne constantly in mind in assessing the significance of Jeff’s victory. It, and it alone, extracted legislation from an indifferent administration, though there were notable elements within it—including Jim Prior, then the Northern Ireland Secretary—who gladly changed course in the light of the Strasbourg judgement.
Almost exactly one year later, on 25 October 1982, the Northern Ireland (Sexual Offences) Order was passed by the House of Commons, with all the Province’s MPs opposing it. In a book of memoirs, Matthew Parris recalls how he overcame considerable nervousness to speak in favour of the legislation. In his brief, moving speech, he said: “Seldom does so small a measure, debated in so short a time and brought at such a late hour, touch so deeply the lives of so many thousands of people in the United Kingdom.” It was important moment in Matthew’s life. His emergence as a gay rights campaigner was to follow soon afterwards . Many lives throughout the country would be touched and assisted by his work in future years.
Winston Churchill said many things in 1940, including this: “ When the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting”. The Dudgeon case defies that Churchillian wisdom. It stands in exactly the same high setting today as it did forty years ago—perhaps even higher, when the long succession of subsequent developments which it helped make possible is taken into account.
Whenever I think of Jeff Dudgeon, the name of another Ulsterman springs into my mind. Harford Montgomery Hyde was a very liberal-minded Ulster Unionist MP between 1950 and 1959. Though not gay himself, he courted acute controversy in Protestant Belfast by calling repeatedly for the repeal of anti-gay laws. He did not make life easy for himself. “Mr Hyde”, said Billy Douglas, a legendary Ulster Unionist official, “are you mad? You have put a list of great homosexuals at the back of your book on Oscar Wilde with William of Orange at the top of it.” He was deselected in 1959. Appropriately, Jeff has written a little book about this courageous man who, like him, defied abuse and hostility to demand human rights for gay people.
May I end with a personal reflection—one which Jeff, I think, shares? I have always felt that the interests of gay people are not well-served by the existence of devolved parliaments within the United Kingdom. There should be uniform standards of human rights throughout a unitary state. I often seek Paul Johnson’s counsel on this point. Throughout the 1980s, I hoped that it might be possible to prevent the return of wide law-making powers to Stormont, and so stop the devolution bandwagon in Scotland and Wales. Gay people should at all times have exactly the same rights and freedoms in Belfast and Birmingham. If that had been achieved, it would have been a fine sequel to Jeff’s great victory on this day forty years ago.
