A Trinidad and Tobago man has won a nearly decade-long legal appeal to the last court of appeal available to him – the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of former colonial power Britain.
Jason Jones, a gay man born in Trinidad and Tobago, had challenged the Caribbean nation’s sexual offenses law banning consensual sex between adult men, saying it violated his human rights under the country’s constitution.
He initially won his case in the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago, but the government and religious organizations managed to partially overturn the decision once again, prompting Jones to take the case to the island nation’s highest appellate authority, the Privy Council of the United Kingdom.
“To discriminate against someone simply because of who they choose to love is just ridiculous,” Jones told The Associated Press after Tuesday’s ruling.
The Privy Council in London is the final court of appeal for some Commonwealth countries, including Trinidad and Tobago, although the issue was already controversial in some circles before Tuesday’s ruling.
What is the decision of the London court?
A panel of five judges unanimously granted Jones’ appeal, rejecting a counter-appeal from the Caribbean country’s attorney general.
It found that two sections of the Sexual Offenses Act 1986, criminalizing “sodomy” and “gross indecency” among same-sex couples respectively, violated Jones’ fundamental rights to private and family life set out in the 1976 constitution.
The court wrote in its decision
Anti-gay laws that carry up to five years in prison have not been enforced in recent history, but critics say they nonetheless send a message of intimidation.
Judge Philip Sales said in announcing the judgment that “the current understanding of the fundamental individual right to respect for private and family life is that it protects as essential a part of human identity as one’s sexual orientation.”
Sales added that “laws that seek to criminalize such activities cannot be justified.”
Trinidadian authorities argued that because the 1986 laws were passed by a supermajority and constituted criminal sanctions dating back to colonial times, before the constitution, they could be considered “existing laws” and override individual constitutional rights in certain circumstances.
But the Privy Council judges ruled that the so-called “reservation” for this special status – “unless the law is not reasonably justifiable in a society which respects the rights and freedoms of the individual” – had not been respected.
One of Jones’ lawyers, Anand Ramlogan, is a former attorney general of Trinidad and Tobago and opposed this position earlier in the case.
“Constitutional rights exist precisely because majorities are not always right,” Ramlogan said. “They ensure that the dignity and equality of every citizen is not left to fluctuations in public opinion.”
Who is the caller?
Jason Jones is a 61 year old man born in Trinidad and Tobago.
Openly gay since the age of 16, he says he fled the country in 1996 due to homophobic violence and discrimination.
Speaking to The Associated Press on Tuesday after what he called a “resounding victory,” he said he would describe himself as a “very angry homosexual” whose anger had helped him persist in his legal challenge for so many years.
“Society treated me worse than a criminal,” he said. “There is a real sense of vindication with this ruling. Finally, the courts are realizing that they need to step up their efforts because our politicians are so toothless.”
He said he was inspired to speak out after losing friends to HIV/AIDS and after meeting American singer-songwriter Nina Simone during a three-week tour of the island in 1984, when he was 19.
“It was Nina who said, ‘Jason, get off this rock and go see the world,'” he said, calling it a defining and life-changing experience.
Trinidad and Tobago may not enforce its “buggery” law, but it carries a custodial sentence.
The Trinidad and Tobago government, the country’s Council of Evangelical Churches and its largest Hindu organization, Sanatan Dharm Maha Sabha, have contested the case, which has made its way through several courts since the appeal was launched in 2017.
In 2018, the Trinidad High Court ruled these laws unconstitutional. But in 2025, a local appeals court partially overturned the decision. The Trinidad Court of Appeal subsequently allowed Jones to seek a ruling from the final Court of Appeal in England.
The case was closely followed by Caribbean activists, and similar laws were in effect in several other countries in the region.
The Bahamas decriminalized homosexuality in 1991.
The United Kingdom repealed the laws of the overseas territories of Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2001.
Judges in Barbados, Dominica, Saint Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda have also recently struck down similar laws.
But in the former British colonies of Grenada, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, it remains a crime.
The UK only decriminalized gay sex in 1967, more than four centuries after the introduction of so-called “buggery” laws under King Henry VII, and more than a century after the last executions for the crime. People were still prosecuted or threatened with prosecution for consensual homosexual sex between adults until after World War II, with the most famous case in recent years surely being that of computer and codebreaking pioneer and war hero Alan Turing.
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