On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights declared the application of a Northern Irish gay activist “inadmissible” on the grounds of “non-exhaustion of domestic remedies”.
The case dates back to 2014 and is to with a personalised cake that was ordered from a bakery in Belfast.
The Christian couple who owned the bakery refused to prepare and deliver the cake because of the pro-gay marriage message that the complainant, Gareth Lee, had asked to be included on the icing (“Support gay marriage”), along with drawings of the QueerSpace logo and two Sesame Street puppets.
Gareth Lee won his case in the local courts and on appeal on the grounds of discrimination, but the couple who owned the bakery, backed by a fundamentalist Christian lobby, took the case to the UK Supreme Court, which overturned the decision.
The complainant then turned to the European Court of Human Rights in 2019, which declared his application inadmissible since arguments drawn from the European Convention on Human Rights had not been raised “explicitly or in substance” before the domestic authorities, thus depriving them of the opportunity to be able to examine the case from that angle. Link to the decision: https://bit.ly/3G1JtEF (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)