Peter Frank Ashman was a well-respected lawyer who spent the majority of his career advocating for human rights and particularly fighting against legislation discriminating against LGBTQ people. He was involved in a landmark legal case in the 1980s, that was found in favour of LGBTQ rights and that is said to have paved the way for the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in Northern Ireland in 1982.
Born in 1950 in St Albans, Peter spent most of his childhood in nearby Essex and also abroad, later studying law at King’s College, London. Early in his professional career, in the 1970s, he worked with the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), which at the time was beginning to gain traction and recognition as one of the leading champions for LGBTQ rights in the UK. Around the same time CHE held the first national gay rights conference, an event that Peter likely took part in. His role with CHE involved advising them on setting up a law reform committee, which worked towards legal and social equality for LGBTQ rights, in particular for the equalisation of the age of consent for homosexual couples, which, at the time, was much higher than that of heterosexual couples (at 21 years and 16 years old respectively).
It was at the 1978 CHE conference that Peter was asked to join a team that organised the founding of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA). His input focused particularly on deciding the political actions that ILGA wanted to implement. Their purpose was, and is, to campaign for LGBTQ rights within the context of international human and civil rights. The organisation is now represented in more than 110 countries and is recognised by the United Nations[1].
In 1981 a Northern Irish man named Jeff Dudgeon, another of ILGA’s founders, presented a case to the European Court of Human Rights. A shipping clerk in Belfast, as well as a gay rights activist, Dudgeon was questioned about his sexuality by police in the 1970s and subsequently filed a complaint with the European Commission of Human Rights, which eventually led to the 1981 hearing. Dudgeon challenged the law against same-sex relations, specifically Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. The Act had been passed with the selling point that it aimed to protect women and girls by raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 years, but it also acted to suppress brothels and to further criminalise male homosexuality, and continued to discriminate again male homosexuals, some of whom may have also be working in brothels and were therefore at an increased risk of being penalised under this new law. Peter Ashman was part of the legal team working with Jeff Dudgeon, alongside solicitor Paul Crane and CHE activist Terry Munyard amongst others, who presented their arguments to the court in April 1981[2].
The Court ruled that, under Article 8 of the European Convention, the right to a private life also included the right to a private sex life, and that no member nation had the right to impose a total ban on homosexual relations[3]. This landmark case is credited with having brought about both the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in Northern Ireland in 1982, and throughout the rest of Europe in the years following. And following this success, Peter continued to argue for LGBTQ rights in court, in particular in encouraging the UK Charity Commission to grant charity status to explicitly gay organisations.
Stonewall UK group marching at London Pride in 2011. Image from WikiCommons.
His reputation obviously of very good standing by the late 1980s, in 1989 Peter, along with a group of like-minded individuals that included the great Sir Ian McKellen, set up a new London-based organisation called Stonewall Equality Ltd (more commonly known as Stonewall). This was largely in response to Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which sought to prohibit local authorities from promoting homosexuality. The fight for the repeal of Section 28 is one of the most successful campaigns that Stonewall has run, along with their contribution to the campaigns for an equal age of consent and for the right for LGBTQ people to fight in the military.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Peter continued to give legal advice to various LGBT charities and organisations, alongside working for the European Human Rights Foundation (another organised he helped to found), the European Commission, and as a human rights adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He passed away in 2014 at the age of 64.
[1] ILGA (2021), <https://www.ilga.org/> Accessed 13 Sep 2021
[2] “Dudgeon v. United Kingdom”, HRCR, <http://www.hrcr.org/safrica/dignity/Dudgeon%20_UK.htm> Accessed 13 Sep 2021
[3]“Decriminalisation of homosexual acts – Northern Ireland”, Voices and Visibility (2019), <http://voicesandvisibility.org.uk/timeline/decriminalisation-of-homosexual-acts-northern-ireland/> Accessed 14 Sep 2021
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