LSA Consultation Response to Scottish Government’s Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Strategy

Legal Services Agency recently contributed to an important consultation by the Scottish Government regarding their Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Strategy.

The purpose of the strategy is to embed principles of equality, inclusion, and human rights across all the work of the Scottish Government, as well as supporting the wider public sector in Scotland to do the same.

Legal Services Agency welcomed the opportunity to respond to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the strategy. With a longstanding commitment to promoting social justice, addressing the effects of poverty, disadvantage, and discrimination, and advocating for human rights and equalities, we are well positioned to offer insights grounded in extensive experience providing legal services to marginalised communities across Scotland.

In a detailed response, we expressed our support for the strategy’s vision to create strong, diverse, inclusive, empowered, resilient, and safe communities where everyone enjoys their human rights.

We also broadly support the proposed objectives, which focus on removing systemic barriers, improving policy decision-making, embedding leadership and cultural change, and ensuring transparency and accountability. These objectives are critical to achieving meaningful change in how equality and human rights are integrated into governance and public service delivery.

However, we emphasised that without strong legal enforcement and accountability, mainstreaming risks being a procedural exercise rather than a transformative approach. We made several recommendations that could enhance the objectives of the strategy, including:

• Defining ‘mainstreaming’ clearly in terms of legal duties, enforceability and expected outcomes to prevent it from becoming a vague aspiration.
• Emphasising intersectionality and ensuring the compounded effects of multiple forms of discrimination are meaningfully considered in policymaking and service delivery.
• Strengthening accountability mechanisms and implementing measures to hold public bodies accountable for non-compliance.
• Explicitly acknowledging ‘access to justice’ as a key means of dismantling systemic barriers, and legal protections (such as legal aid and community-based legal services) as essential to challenging injustice.

While Legal Services Agency fully supports the strategy’s ambition to mainstream equality and human rights into public sector decision-making, we urge the Scottish Government to ensure that this in underpinned by enforceability, accountability, and practical support for public bodies to make a meaningful impact.

In this regard, we urge the Scottish Government to prioritise other legislative frameworks, such as the review of legal aid and the Human Rights Bill, which would further support the implementation of the principles in the framework. By incorporating these additional considerations and recommendations, we believe the strategy can more effectively promote equality, protect human rights, and foster inclusive communities across Scotland.

To read our full response to the Scottish Government’s Equality and Human Rights Mainstreaming Strategy Consultation, please click here.