The UK’s top judges have begun hearing an appeal over whether a Trinidad and Tobago court had the legal right to overturn a 2018 ruling that removed the country’s colonial-era ‘buggery law’, also known as the ‘sodomy law’, which criminalises anal sex between consenting men. The law, created in 1925, was written into Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 Sexual Offences Act. In 2017, a Trinidadian LGBTQ+ rights activist, Jason Jones, challenged the law, and in 2018 a high court ruled that it infringed upon his constitutional right to privacy and equality.
However, last year a court of appeal quashed that decision after an intervention by the country’s attorney general. Now Jones’s appeal is being heard by the London-based judicial committee of the privy council (JCPC), the highest court of appeal for the UK’s overseas territories, crown dependencies, and several independent Commonwealth countries. The JCPC shares the same judges as the UK supreme court.
The Trinidadian government is opposing Jones in the case, with Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar arguing that the case could have a wide-ranging impact as it could affect other ‘savings clauses’ – laws imposed on Caribbean nations when they were still British colonies to ensure they preserved British laws after independence. Persad-Bissessar stated that the ruling would be a ‘very profound decision, not just impacting on sodomy laws but that whole issue of the saving clause.’ The case is being closely watched by activists across the Caribbean, with an outcome expected in three to six months’ time. The Bahamas decriminalised homosexuality in 1991, and the UK government repealed such laws in 2001 in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Recently, judges have 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. Jones, 61, said the case should never have had to reach the British court, stating that ‘at any time over the last decade of my legal challenge, the state and indeed parliament could have put a stop to this and just removed these heinous laws themselves.’ He added that the law ‘dehumanises LGBTQ+ people.
It makes us both a criminal and a victim at the same time.’ Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s former taoiseach and a global LGBTQI and human rights fellow at Harvard University, noted that the only five countries in the Americas that continued to outlaw homosexuality were formerly under British rule. He pointed to the irony that ‘colonial-era laws that have long since been repealed in the United Kingdom itself’ remained active in former colonies.
