A final court of appeal in the UK overturned a centuries-old ban on gay sex in Trinidad and Tobago on Tuesday in a ruling welcomed by campaigners across the world.
Bringing an end to a nearly 10-year battle for gay rights in the twin-island state, the decision is final.
"Those laws cannot be regarded as reasonably justifiable in a society that has a proper respect for the rights and freedom of the individual," stated Judge Philip James Sales of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
Delivering the unanimous decision, he said: "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 added that "laws which seek to criminalise such activities cannot be justified".
The lawsuit was brought in February 2017 by Jason Jones, who contended that colonial-era "buggery" legislation in Trinidad and Tobago violated the constitution. Although sentences of up to five years imprisonment under these statutes were not enforced in modern times, campaigners maintained they continued to convey a harmful message.
Having been openly gay from the age of 16, Jones departed Trinidad and Tobago in 1996 following what he characterised as homophobic prejudice and violent treatment.
Opposing the challenge were Trinidad and Tobago’s government, alongside the Council of Evangelical Churches and the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, the nation’s primary Hindu organisation.
Trinidad’s High Court initially declared the statutes unconstitutional in April 2018, though a domestic appellate court partially overturned this decision in March 2025. The Court of Appeals subsequently granted Jones permission to take his suit to London’s Privy Council.
Though a sovereign republic in the Commonwealth, Trinidad and Tobago retains the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as its ultimate court of appeal, despite ongoing calls to transition to the local Caribbean Court of Justice.
Government officials had requested a judgment endorsing the March 2025 determination, where a majority panel concluded that the High Court had overstepped by permitting judicial alteration of legislation. Specific constitutional clauses across certain Caribbean nations, including Trinidad and Tobago, shield legacy colonial statutes from constitutional review.
Similar anti-sodomy legislation remains in force in other Caribbean territories, including Grenada, Jamaica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Elsewhere in the region, the Bahamas decriminalised same-sex acts in 1991, while the UK government abolished equivalent laws across Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2001. Recent judicial rulings have also invalidated comparable laws in Barbados, Dominica, St Lucia, and Antigua and Barbuda.
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