UK Privy Council Strikes Down Trinidad and Tobago's Law Criminalizing Gay Sex

A man who left Trinidad and Tobago in 1996 because of homophobic violence has won, from a courtroom in London, a case he started in 2017. On Tuesday, the judicial committee of the Privy Council, the final court of appeal for Trinidad and Tobago as a legacy of British colonial rule, overturned two provisions of the country's Sexual Offences Act that criminalized consensual sex between men.

The appellant, Jason Jones, is 61 and was born in Trinidad and Tobago. He argued that the 1986 law breached his fundamental rights under the country's 1976 constitution. A panel of five judges agreed unanimously, allowing his appeal and dismissing a counter-appeal from the country's Attorney General. The two sections at issue criminalized "buggery" and "serious indecency" between same-sex couples, and the court held that both violated his rights to private and family life.

The judges wrote that Jones's interests involve "a particularly important facet of his existence and identity," because the ability to form an intimate and loving relationship with another person lies at the core of that right. Judge Philip Sales, announcing the ruling, said the current understanding of the right to respect for private and family life protects something as central to human identity as sexual orientation, and that laws seeking to criminalize such activities cannot be justified.

The road to that conclusion was long. Trinidad's High Court found the laws unconstitutional in 2018. In 2025, a local appeals court partially reversed that decision, after the government and religious organizations pushed back. Among the parties contesting the case were the Council of Evangelical Churches and the country's largest Hindu organization, Sanatan Dharm Maha Sabha. The local appeals court then allowed Jones to take the matter to the Privy Council.

Trinidadian authorities had argued that because the 1986 laws were passed with a super-majority, and carried criminal penalties dating to colonial times before the constitution, they counted as "existing law" that can override individual constitutional rights in some circumstances. The Privy Council judges found that the condition attached to that protection had not been met: the law had not been shown to be reasonably justifiable in a society with proper respect for individual rights and freedoms. The laws carry up to five years in prison. They have not been enforced in recent history, but critics say they still send an intimidating message.

One of Jones's lawyers, Anand Ramlogan, is a former attorney general of Trinidad and Tobago. "Constitutional rights exist precisely because majorities are not always right," he said, adding that they ensure the dignity and equality of every citizen are not left to the changing tides of public opinion.

Jones told the Associated Press the ruling was a "stunning victory." He described himself as a "very angry gay man" and said that anger had sustained him through the years of litigation. "Society has treated me worse than a criminal," he said, calling the judgment a real vindication and saying the courts had stepped up because politicians were "so toothless." He has been openly gay since he was 16. He said he was moved to speak out after losing friends to HIV/AIDS, and after meeting singer-songwriter Nina Simone, who toured the islands for three weeks in 1984, when he was 19. She told him, he recalled, to get off the rock and go see the world.

The case was watched closely across the Caribbean, where the legal picture is mixed. The Bahamas decriminalized homosexuality in 1991, and in 2001 the UK repealed such laws in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Judges in Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda have also recently struck down similar laws. Grenada, Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and until now Trinidad and Tobago, still treat it as a crime. Britain itself decriminalized gay sex only in 1967, centuries after the first buggery laws under Henry VII. The question now is whether activists in the remaining countries can use this ruling in their own courts.