A British court has overturned a law prohibiting gay sex in Trinidad and Tobago, marking a milestone for LGBTQ+ rights in the twin-island Caribbean nation and nullifying a colonial era law dating over a century.
In its ruling, the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council – the highest appeals court for several former British colonies – said that it agreed with a lower court ruling that had previously struck down the islands’ government law, which had criminalized “buggery” and “indecency” between gay partners.
The law had allowed for prison terms of up to five years for “buggery” and two years for “gross indecency.” In contemporary legal systems, the term “buggery” is largely obsolete and considered offensive.
Ruling that Trinidad and Tobago’s law was unconstitutional, Privy Council Judge Philip Sales said: “Those laws cannot be regarded as reasonably justifiable in a society that has a proper respect for the rights and freedoms of the individual.”
“Laws which seek to criminalize such activities cannot be justified,” Sales said.
Trinidad and Tobago is a former British colony that gained independence in the 1960s and remains a republic within the British Commonwealth.
While a number of other former colonies have overturned or repealed colonial-era sodomy laws — with England and Wales decriminalizing gay male sex in the 1960s — similar restrictions remain in dozens of others.
The Privy Council had been asked to rule on Trinidad and Tobago’s law after it was challenged by Jason Jones, an LGBTQ+ rights activist who was born in Trinidad and lives in the UK. Jones first challenged the law in the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago, winning a victory in 2018, but the islands’ Court of Appeal overturned that ruling in 2025. Jones and his attorneys then took the case to the Privy Council for a final appeal.
Activists and legal experts say the judgment could pave the way for similar challenges from campaigners in other former colonies that still criminalize gay sex. At least four other former British colonies in the Caribbean — Jamaica, Guyana, Grenada and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — criminalize sexual activity between men, according to the UK charity Human Dignity Trust, though not all are in the Privy Council’s appellate jurisdiction.
Ahead of the ruling, Jones told CNN that he had filed his lawsuit to kick off a movement toward equality, though he acknowledged there was a long road ahead.
“My case is not just about decriminalizing (gay sexual acts in) countries in the Commonwealth that carry these British colonial-era laws. It’s about making people aware (of) how homophobia is being weaponized to take away our democratic rights,” he said.
The Human Dignity Trust welcomed Tuesday’s ruling, with its chief executive Téa Braun saying, “This is not only a victory for LGBT+ people in Trinidad and Tobago but another powerful affirmation that laws criminalizing private, consensual same-sex intimacy have no place in a society with due respect for fundamental rights and freedoms.”
Beyond LBGTQ+ rights, the case highlights how Britain’s imperialist legacy continues to influence the legal systems of some of its former colonies and has led many to question why some now-independent countries still cling to policies dropped by their former ruler decades ago.
“We have to still think about the fact that these laws were inherited from our colonial masters,” said Ria Mohammed, an attorney and director of the Caribbean Centre for Human Rights. “They (the British) have long since abandoned them. So why are we holding on to them?”
An ancient law
The origin of the law goes back centuries, with England passing a “Buggery Act” during Henry VIII’s rule in the 1500s. The British Empire later enacted a version of it in Trinidad and Tobago with a 1925 act.
After Trinidad became independent, it kept the ban in place due to a savings law clause that shields pre-independence laws from being challenged, Mohammed said. The clause was originally created by the British as a temporary measure to prevent legal vacuums as ex-colonies transitioned to independence, but some ex-colonies including Trinidad and Tobago continue to implement them. Critics say that has allowed outdated policies that no longer meet modern societal standards to remain in force in some countries.
In 1986, Trinidad and Tobago repealed the sexual offenses laws of the 1925 act and introduced new, tougher measures which increased prison sentences for offenders and punished women for indecency, too. It was this move that paved the way for Jones’ challenge to the law.
Jones’ lawyers argued that the new 1986 measures were distinct from those in the colonial-era act of 1925, so they weren’t protected by the savings law clause and could indeed be challenged.
“This is no longer blaming Henry VIII and the British. This is our own homegrown homophobia,” Jones told CNN.
The Privy Council agreed, ruling on Tuesday that the criminalization of private sexual acts between consenting adults is not immune from challenge.
It ruled that clauses that immunize old laws from challenge based on fundamental constitutional rights “should be interpreted narrowly” so they don’t protect large areas of old law from scrutiny.
“Whatever might have been the position in 1986, the current understanding of the fundamental individual right to respect for private and family life is that it protects such a core part of human identity as one’s sexual orientation and the sexual activities carried out in private between consenting adults to give expression to that identity,” Sales said.
The ‘ultimate irony’
The judgment applies to Trinidad and Tobago only. However, activists hope it could pave the way to challenges against gay sex bans in some of the other former colonies that still use the London-based court as their highest appeals court.
“The decision is going to be binding in Trinidad and Tobago. But as a matter of logic, if you are a part of the appellate structure of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council … it is unlikely that a case from a different jurisdiction would be decided in a different way,” Mohammed said.
As a result, the outcome of the case is likely to be closely watched across the English-speaking Caribbean, where several former colonies have kept the Privy Council as their final court of appeal while also continuing to maintain laws against gay sex.
In some of these countries, Jones’ case has renewed debate about whether they should replace the Privy Council with the Caribbean Court of Justice as their final court of appeal.
Five countries (Belize, Guyana, Barbados, Saint Lucia and Dominica) have already done so.
Mohammed said it was ironic that to settle a challenge on a colonial-era policy, Trinidad and Tobago had to use the judicial system of its former colonial ruler.
“That is the ultimate irony, and it also is a moment for us to sit and reflect about what are we really doing?” she said. “It really is about us having a mature conversation about what kind of society do we want to build.”
By Michael Rios, CNN
