Top UK appeals court rules gay sex not a crime in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A final court of appeals in England struck down a centuries-old gay sex ban in Trinidad and Tobago in a ruling on Tuesday that activists around the world celebrated.
The ruling ended a nearly 10-year battle for gay rights in the twin-island nation and cannot be appealed.
“Those laws cannot be regarded as reasonably justifiable in a society that has a proper respect for the rights and freedom of the individual,” said Judge Philip James Sales of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
“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 on in private between consenting adults to give expression to that identity,” he read as part of the unanimous decision. “Laws which seek to criminalize such activities cannot be justified.”
In February 2017, Jason Jones filed the case, arguing that so-called “buggery” laws dating from when Trinidad and Tobago was a British colony are unconstitutional. The laws that call for up to five years in prison have not been enforced in recent history, but critics say they still send a message.
Jones, who has been openly gay since age 16, left Trinidad and Tobago in 1996 because of what he described as homophobic violence and discrimination.
Those who opposed Jones include Trinidad and Tobago’s government, the country’s Council of Evangelical Churches and its largest Hindu organization, Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha.
In April 2018, Trinidad’s High Court found the laws unconstitutional, but a local appeals court partially reversed that ruling in March 2025. Trinidad’s Court of Appeals later allowed Jones to seek a ruling from the Privy Council in England. Trinidad and Tobago is a sovereign republic within the British Commonwealth and still uses London’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as its highest court of final appeal. However, the country has pushed for the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice to replace the Privy Council.
Trinidad and Tobago’s government sought a ruling that would uphold the March 2025 ruling. A majority of justices in 2025 found that the High Court erred by allowing judges to change a law. A provision in some Caribbean constitutions protects colonial laws from legal challenges, including in Trinidad and Tobago.
Caribbean nations with so-called buggery laws still on the books include Grenada, Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Meanwhile, the Bahamas decriminalized homosexuality in 1991, and the U.K. government repealed such laws in 2001 in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, judges have recently struck down similar laws in Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda.
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