In June 2025, following careful consideration, the Equal Rights Trust Board of Trustees agreed to initiate the orderly closure of the organisation. The Equal Rights Trust will close on 30 September 2025.
This decision was taken with deep regret. It followed a strategic review of the Trust’s future plans and financial sustainability which was led by the Director, with the active involvement of Trustees.
In the last year, the Trust has experienced growing financial pressures, in the context of an increasingly challenging funding environment for organisations working to promote equality. Our decision to close reflects a managed and proactive response to these challenges, not a reaction to any immediate crisis or financial failure.
Over the coming months, we intend to complete all of our current projects, delivering for our partners and maintaining the highest standards in all of our work. We will meet our financial obligations to donors, partners, beneficiaries and staff. We will also work to ensure that the resources and networks which we have helped to develop are maintained and sustained.
The Equal Rights Trust was founded to make the case for an inclusive, substantive approach to equality through supporting the adoption and implementation of comprehensive equality laws. We have remained committed to this vision and mission, despite pressures to shift approach or narrow our focus. In recent years, we have been pleased to see growing and sustained support for this comprehensive approach.
For more than 15 years, we have worked to promote the adoption of comprehensive equality laws, working with and supporting partners in more than 60 countries. In 2020, responding to the needs of these partners, we established a unique partnership with the UN Human Rights Office to produce the first authoritative UN guidance on these laws. Since the launch of this guidance, the adoption of these laws has been made a top priority by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; public bodies in Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico have initiated equality law reform projects; and new civil society equality law movements have been launched in Costa Rica, Japan and Nepal. The number of current initiatives for the adoption of comprehensive equality laws is unprecedented. We are proud to have played a part in building this growing global movement.
Alongside this work, we have partnered with others to build understanding of the role of the law in addressing inequalities and develop thinking on how to strengthen the implementation of equality laws. We are pleased to have played a role in developing understanding of issues as wide-ranging as discrimination and statelessness; discriminatory torture; discriminatory corruption; and discrimination at work. Most recently, we are proud to have supported Equinet to develop guidance for the implementation of new EU Directives on Standards for Equality Bodies which is now being used by Equality Bodies across the region as they work to strengthen implementation of equality laws.
Partnership – working together for equality – has always been at the heart of our work. Any impact we have achieved is the result of collaboration with others fighting for equality. Our partners are a source of optimism and hope, even while we make our own difficult decision. While the Trust will no longer have a role in advancing equality through law, we know that our partners will continue the fight
We are sad to share this decision, but grateful to all those with whom we have worked and hopeful that our partners will be able to build on the work which we have done together to build more equal societies.
