Lawyers representing a man from Northern Ireland who sued a bakery for refusing to make a cake with pro-gay marriage message are going to Europe to challenge a supreme court ruling that its evangelical Christian owners had a right to refuse to bake it.

Belfast human rights law firm Phoenix Law confirmed on Thursday it had been instructed by Gareth Lee to take his case to the European court of human rights (ECHR). Lee was told by Ashers bakery in 2014 that it would not make a cake with the message “Support Gay Marriage” on it because it was contrary to the owners’ religious beliefs.

Four years later the supreme court reversed earlier decisions at Belfast county court and court of appeal that Ashers had discriminated against Lee on the grounds of him being gay. Five judges on the supreme court, which in 2018 sat for the first time in Northern Ireland, found that the bakery did not refuse Lee’s order because of his sexual orientation. They ruled therefore that there was no discrimination on those grounds.

But Lee’s legal team are now arguing in the ECHR that the supreme court ruling should be overturned because baking the cake did not imply “the bakery supporting (expressly or implicitly) the message of the cake”. Read more via the Guardian