Conducting a National Inquiry into Systemic Patterns of Human Rights Violation Five workshops addressing human rights and discrimination for transgender people were facilitated in 2008 and 2009. In addition, three workshops were held in five centres, linked to a touring art exhibition, ‘Assume Nothing’,32 raising the visibility of transgender people and reaching over 200,000 people. The Commission facilitated human rights education programmes in schools and across the public and private sectors. In 2008, the Commission held a health sector roundtable to facilitate discussions between transgender people, health professionals and the Ministry of Health. Participants proposed that the Ministry of Health support a Working Group to develop guidance for the provision of appropriate health services for transgender people. After initial support from the Ministry of Health, subsequent government decisions resulted in limited funding for an initial good practice guide for health professionals, published in 2011.33 In 2012, the Department of Internal Affairs worked collaboratively with transgender people to develop a world-leading passport policy based on self-declaration and requiring no medical evidence. Statistics NZ consulted transgender people on the development of a statistical standard for gender identity which was published in 2015. However, until recently, no progress had been made on the collection of gender identity data in official statistics to measure the experiences of transgender people. The first data collection was announced in June 2019 in Statistics NZ’s Household Economic Survey, with results due in 2020, and the aim of collecting data in NZ’s 2023 Census.34 The Inquiry report and subsequent activity contributed to a robust submission to the country’s first Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in 2009 and to subsequent reviews. While silent in the previous two reviews, the 2019 UPR recommended that the New Zealand Government amend the Human Rights Act 1993 to explicitly prohibit discrimination of the basis of gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics.35 The Inquiry report also contributed to further international reports of New Zealand’s human rights performance. In 2012, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women recommended that New Zealand “improve access and quality of health services for lesbian women and transgendered persons”. Four recommendations relating to intersex children were made to the New Zealand Government by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2016. After a series of Roundtables co-hosted by the Commission and the Intersex Trust Aotearoa New Zealand, an Intersex Expert Advisory Group was established for a fixed period of two years. This group is funded by the Ministry of Health through the NZ Paediatric Society. In 2018, ten years after the Inquiry was completed, the New Zealand Human Rights Commission reviewed what progress had been made against the report’s recommendations and what still needed to take place to advance them. The ten-year review found that, while much had been achieved, there were still significant gaps that need to be addressed in order to achieve full realisation of human rights for transgender and gender diverse people in Aotearoa New Zealand. Among the achievements, the General Social Survey and Statistics NZ has implemented the international good practice ‘two-step’ question method to ask first about sex recorded at birth, and then gender, in the Household Economic Survey.36 96 32 Assume Nothing Workshops. Information available at: www.rebeccaswan.com/assumenothing.htm. 33 See: www.moh.govt.nz/notebook/nbbooks.nsf/0/255ADB3E32BC40EACC2578F5000AF05B/$file/gender-reassignment-health -services-for-trans-people-nz.pdf. 34 See: www.stats.govt.nz/reports/sex-gender-and-sexual-orientation. 35 This recommendation was received from Iceland. Although no less important, the recommendation from Australia had slightly different wording which did not include ‘gender expression’ and used ‘intersex status’ rather than ‘sex characteristics’. Neither were accepted by the government. 36 Statistics New Zealand; June 2019; available at: www.stats.govt.nz/news/gender-inclusive-questions-introduced-to-betterreflect-new-zealanders.