Some of the United Kingdom's most senior judges have begun hearing arguments in a case that could determine the fate of Trinidad and Tobago's colonial-era "buggery law," which criminalises anal sex between consenting men.
The law dates to 1925 and was later incorporated into the country's 1986 Sexual Offences Act. In 2017, Trinidadian LGBTQ+ rights activist Jason Jones challenged the statute, and a year later a high court agreed, ruling that it violated his constitutional rights to privacy and equality.
That victory was short-lived. Last year, a court of appeal quashed the 2018 decision following intervention by Trinidad and Tobago's attorney general. Jones is now appealing to the judicial committee of the privy council in London, the highest court of appeal for the UK's overseas territories, crown dependencies, and several independent Commonwealth nations, which shares its judges with the UK supreme court. A ruling is expected within three to six months.
The case is being watched closely across the Caribbean, where the legal status of the "sodomy law" varies widely. The Bahamas decriminalised homosexuality in 1991, and Britain repealed similar laws in 2001 across Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Courts have since struck down comparable laws in Barbados, Dominica, St Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda. Yet anal sex remains a criminal offence in Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Trinidad and Tobago's government is opposing Jones in the case. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar told the Guardian at a Caribbean leaders' summit in St Lucia that the ruling could reach far beyond sodomy laws, potentially affecting so-called "savings clauses" — provisions that preserved British-era laws after independence across the English-speaking Caribbean. "This ruling is going to be a very profound decision... this will give us guidance as to which ones we keep, which ones we don't keep," she said.
Darrell Allahar, a minister in the prime minister's office and one of her lawyers, said the hearing was a "very good exercise" aimed at clarifying how savings clauses function across regional constitutions.
A personal fight
Jones, 61, said the matter should never have required British court intervention. "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 said, adding that the government had "wasted millions of taxpayers' money" fighting him. Under the law, offenders can face up to five years in prison. Jones said it "dehumanises LGBTQ+ people," making them "both a criminal and a victim at the same time." He said he remained confident: "I know I'm on the right side of history."
Leo Varadkar, Ireland's former taoiseach and now a human rights fellow at Harvard University, noted that the only five countries in the Americas still outlawing homosexuality — Jamaica, Guyana, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Grenada — are all former British colonies. In a recent Harvard paper, he wrote that this pattern "is not a coincidence," pointing out that such laws have long since been repealed in Britain itself.