UK judges begin hearing appeal over Trinidad and Tobago anti-gay law | Trinidad and Tobago

Some of the UK’s top judges are hearing arguments over whether a Trinidad and Tobago court has the legal right to overturn a 2018 decision to strike down homophobic colonial-era laws that criminalized anal sex between consenting men.

The country’s “buggy law“The law, often referred to as the ‘sodomy’ law, was created in 1925 and was written into Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 law.” Sexual Offenses Act. In 2017, Trinidadian LGBTQ+ rights activist Jason Jones challenged the law, and in 2018 a high court ruled that the law itself violated his constitutional right to privacy and equality.

An appeals court last year overturned that decision after intervention by the country’s attorney general. Now here’s Jones’ objection: is heard By the judicial committee of the London-based privy council (JCPC), the highest court of appeal for the United Kingdom’s overseas territories, crown dependencies and several independent Commonwealth countries. It shares the same justices as the UK supreme court.

Activists in the Caribbean are closely watching the trial, with an outcome expected within three to six months.

The Bahamas decriminalized homosexuality in 1991, and the UK government repealed such laws in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2001. Recently, judges struck down similar laws in Barbados, Dominica, St Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda. However, anal sex remains a crime in Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

The Trinidad government is opposing Jones in the case. On Tuesday, prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar argued that the case could have a far-reaching impact because it could affect other “saving clauses” – laws imposed on Caribbean countries while they were still British colonies to ensure they retained British laws after independence.

“This decision will be a very profound decision, it will affect not only the sodomy laws but the whole issue of the savings clause. We have a lot of colonial laws that have been preserved, so this will give us guidance on which ones to keep and which ones not to keep,” Persad-Bissessar told the Guardian in an interview at the Caribbean leaders’ summit in St Lucia.

Darrell Allahar, a minister in the prime minister’s office and one of Persad-Bissessar’s lawyers, called the privacy council hearing “very good practice.”

““We want to hear the court’s opinion because it’s more than sodomy laws, it’s about what’s called the savings clause, which is a feature of all our constitutions in the English-speaking Caribbean,” he said.

He added that the articles were created “to protect existing laws independently, so as not to undermine the entirety of these laws in the light of human rights provisions.”

Jones, 61, said the case should never have gone to the British court. “At any time during the last ten years of my legal struggle, the state, and indeed the parliament, could have put an end to this and repealed these disgusting laws itself,” he said. “They wasted millions of taxpayers’ money fighting me.”

He said the law, under which a person could be imprisoned for up to five years for consensual same-sex intimacy, “dehumanises LGBTQ+ individuals, turning us into criminals and victims simultaneously.”

Jones said he was confident he had a strong case. “The privy council will never support a 500-year-old homophobic section of British law that is against individual rights. Not in 2026,” he said. “I know I’m on the right side of history.”

Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s former taoiseach and a researcher on global LGBTQI and human rights at Harvard University, said in an interview that the only five countries in America that continue to ban homosexuality were previously under British rule. He noted the irony that “colonial-era laws that have long been repealed in the United Kingdom” remain active in former colonies.

In an essay for Harvard last week, Varadkar wrote: With the exception of Jamaica, Guyana, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada, “homosexuality has long been decriminalized in the 35 countries that make up the Americas, from Canada in the north to Chile in the south.” “They all speak English and used to be part of the British empire. That’s not a coincidence.”

He said judges in the UK would preside over this week’s hearing knowing that “human rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy and the right to control what happens to one’s own body and one’s own bedroom” are enshrined in British law.