This has wrong written all over it in every aspect.
SUSAN MANSFIELD
FOR a woman who has just made legal history by successfully challenging a ruling that she was employed by God, Helen Percy cuts an unlikely figure.
With a woolly hat pulled down tightly over her fair hair and an apologetic gait, she explains she has just returned from tending her sheep. For her, there are no photo opportunities or PR people guiding her through the media scrum.
Instead, just hours after a landmark ruling in the House of Lords against the Church of Scotland, The Scotsman found Ms Percy, 39, alone on the windswept hills of Perthshire. But, despite her apparent isolation, she is determined to make sure what happened to her doesn’t befall others in the Church.
It is eight years since Ms Percy claimed she was forced out of her job after being accused of having an affair with a married church elder in her rural parish. She launched a sex discrimination claim but lost after being told she was an office holder – in effect employed by God – rather than an employee of the Church.
But the Law Lords yesterday overturned two previous rulings by an employment tribunal and the Court of Session in Edinburgh and decided Ms Percy should be allowed to take her sex discrimination claim against the Church to another employment tribunal.
