The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that the Czech Republic violated the right to private life of a non-binary citizen by refusing to alter the gendered portion of their personal identification number unless they underwent irreversible gender reassignment surgery.
The opinion, published Thursday, marks a partial victory for the complainant, identified as T.H., who claimed to have long struggled with the male identity assigned at birth but opted not to have surgery due to health concerns.
As reported by Echo24, T.H. legally changed their name and obtained a new identity card in 2012, but Czech authorities declined to modify the birth number, which reflects a person’s gender. The national law requires individuals to undergo surgery before their legal gender can be officially changed.
The ECHR found that this legal requirement constituted a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to private and family life. In its reasoning, the court said: “Making the legal recognition of transgender people’s new gender identity conditional on the undergoing of surgery, which entails or may entail sterilization against their will, constituted making the full exercise of their right to respect for private life conditional on the full exercise of their right to bodily integrity.”
The court added that the Czech authorities failed to strike a fair balance between the general interest and the individual’s rights, stating that the refusal amounted to a denial of T.H.’s gender identity. However, the ECHR declined to rule on a separate complaint alleging a violation of Article 14 on non-discrimination.
As compensation, the court ordered the Czech Republic to pay T.H. €2,000 euros to cover part of their legal expenses. The court concluded that the acknowledgment of the rights violation itself constituted sufficient moral satisfaction.
The case had previously reached the Czech Constitutional Court, which ruled against T.H. in 2022, declaring, “In the Czech Republic, people are divided into women and men. This understanding of the binary existence of the human species does not originate in the will of the state in the sense of the will of public authority, as the public authorities have only accepted it as a social reality.”
“If it is constitutionally accepted, and even foreseen by the constitutional order, that people are divided into men and women… then it seems logical that the state records information about gender,” the Czech court added at the time.
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