Privy Council overturns Trinidad and Tobago's anti-homosexuality laws

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Caribbean island's final court of appeal, ruled unanimously in favour of Jason Jones, 62. The London-based judges found the laws did not uphold the ``fundamental individual right to respect for private and family life.'' Handing down the judgement, Lord Sales said the laws ``cannot be regarded as reasonably justifiable in a society that has a proper respect for the rights and freedoms of an individual.''

Jones first won in Trinidad's High Court in 2018, but the Trinidadian government overturned that ruling on appeal, pushing the case to London. The battle took 11 years in total. Jones said he hoped the outcome would ``accelerate the fight for full equality.''

Trinidad and Tobago's Attorney General had argued the legislation was shielded from challenge by ``savings law clauses'' that carried existing British laws into newly independent states. Jones' representatives countered that the laws violated privacy rights, and that the government's 1986 changes, which introduced stricter punishments, meant those protections no longer applied. The committee sided with Jones.

Before the decision, Trinidad and Tobago was one of some 34 Commonwealth countries still criminalising homosexuality under colonial-era British laws, punishable by imprisonment and in some cases the death penalty. It marks the first time the JCPC has ever decided a case to decriminalise same-sex intimacy, and campaigners hope it sparks similar successful challenges elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

Jones said: ``These laws never reflected who we are as a people and a nation - diverse, multiracial, and secular. They told LGBTQ+ people that we were criminals in our own country. That message ends today.'' Lawyer Anand Ramlogan SC, representing Jones, called the judgement a ``landmark victory for gay rights, equal dignity and respect for private and family life in Trinidad and Tobago.''