Dr Ralph Wilde to speak at event on UK gay rights campaigning and his landmark ECHR case

In 1993, Dr Ralph Wilde (Associate Professor at UCL Laws), then a 20-year-old undergraduate student, brought a case with two other young men to the European Court of Human Rights.  The case, Wilde, Greenhalgh and Parry v United Kingdom, challenged the unequal age of consent for gay men, which was 21.  It was part of the then-newly-founded Stonewall’s first ever campaign, which led to a change in the law on the gay male age of consent, to 18 in 1994, and, following two further Strasbourg cases, to an equal age of consent of 16 in 2000. 

Doughty Street Barristers’ Chambers organised an event to commemorate the anniversary of the legal change in 2000, at which Dr Wilde was invited to speak. However, because of objections about the involvement of Tony Blair in that event, due to his role in the 2003 war in Iraq, an alternative, rival event was organised, ‘Queer Theory and Intersectionality – Why Tony Blair is not a Gay Icon’. Dr Wilde will be speaking at the alternative event, about the politics of gay law reform, ‘pinkwashing’, and the war in Iraq. It is open to all and will take place on 27 October at 6.30pm. More information is available here.