TRANSGENDER EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA (TGEU)

Mapping Trans Rights in EU Courts: A Pan-European Pro Bono Effort

Across the European Union, trans people seeking trans-specific healthcare (from access to procedures, to cost reimbursement, to cross-border care) increasingly run into a patchwork of national rules, administrative refusals, and a handful of court decisions that are not well known. The case law exists. What hasn’t existed, until now, is a single place to find it.

That gap is what Trans Europe and Central Asia (TGEU), the umbrella organisation representing trans rights groups across 54 countries in Europe and Central Asia, set out to close. Through its research, advocacy, and movement-building work, TGEU regularly fields requests from trans individuals and member organisations looking for case law to support their own advocacy or litigation. Without a consolidated resource, each of those requests meant starting from scratch – and many national decisions, however significant, stayed invisible outside their own jurisdiction.

A project too large for one organisation to take on alone

Compiling and summarising relevant court and tribunal decisions from across the EU’s 27 member states, spanning issues from permission for healthcare procedures to conversion practices to cross-border access, is the kind of project that would strain the resources of any civil society organisation working on its own. It requires not just legal research capacity, but researchers with the language skills and jurisdictional knowledge to track down decisions that rarely make it into international databases.

This is exactly the kind of challenge Pro Publico exists to solve. As a pan-European pro bono clearinghouse, Pro Publico matches organisations like TGEU with law firms able to provide the breadth of jurisdictional coverage a project like this demands – coordinating the work so that a single, structured methodology is applied consistently across every country covered.

A coordinated, multi-firm response

To meet the scale of TGEU’s request, Pro Publico brought together several of the world’s leading global commercial law firms, each activating its European offices to cover different jurisdictions. Rather than each firm working in isolation, Pro Publico coordinated a shared brief across the group: every case summary needed to cover the same structured elements – title and citation, court level, key facts, the legal issue at stake, the applicable law or regulation, the outcome, the court’s reasoning, and an analysis of its relevance for future litigation.

That consistency matters. A case law compilation is only as useful as it is comparable – a researcher or advocate in one country needs to be able to read a summary from another jurisdiction and immediately understand how the reasoning might apply, or not, to their own context. Keeping every contributing firm aligned on that structure, across six distinct thematic areas (permission for healthcare procedures, cost coverage and reimbursement, anti-discrimination in healthcare settings, consent, conversion practices, and access to cross-border healthcare) was central to making the final compilation genuinely usable rather than just comprehensive.

Filling a real gap for advocates and litigators

The result is a structured resource that TGEU and its member organisations can now draw on directly: trans individuals and advocates seeking to understand how courts elsewhere in the EU have approached a healthcare access question they’re facing themselves, litigators looking for persuasive authority from another jurisdiction, and researchers tracking how trans healthcare rights are developing across the region as a whole.

TGEU described the process as structured and smooth from beginning to end, noting that a project of this scale (reviewing case law across all 27 EU member states) would have been beyond the organisation’s means without pro bono support. 

As TGEU put it: “As a civil society organisation, such a daunting project would have been beyond our means without the support of Pro Publico and the five law firms who supported us with the research. The entire process was structured and smooth, and the final products – case law summaries – were well written and delivered on time. In particular, the Pro Publico team went above and beyond to ensure that all law firms were well-informed of the precise needs and to ensure timely delivery.”

Why this kind of project matters

Projects like this one illustrate something Pro Publico sees across its work with civil society organisations throughout Europe: the legal expertise needed to advance rights work often exists in abundance at commercial law firms, but reaching the organisations that need it – and coordinating that expertise across borders and practice areas – requires a dedicated matchmaking effort. Belgian legal questions are only ever one part of the picture; the majority of Pro Publico’s caseload, including this one, is EU-level or cross-jurisdictional work that no single national legal aid system is built to handle.

For TGEU, the compilation will support the organisation’s ongoing advocacy and its ability to respond to requests from trans individuals and member organisations navigating healthcare access questions in their own countries. For Pro Publico, it’s a model of what’s possible when several firms coordinate around a shared methodology rather than working on separate, disconnected pieces of the same problem.

Pro Publico connects civil society organisations across Europe with law firms providing pro bono legal support. To learn more about this project or to explore a partnership, get in touch.

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