Three questions before five law lords

Five judges of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council — which shares its bench with the UK Supreme Court — began hearing Jason Jones's appeal in Court Room 1 at 10:30am on July 8, 2026, in a case that will determine whether Trinidad and Tobago's colonial-era "buggery law" survives The Guardian. The panel includes Lord Reed, Lord Sales and Lord Lloyd-Jones Supreme Court. The case, JCPC-2025-0095, is docketed as The Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago and others (Respondents) v Jason Jones (Appellant) (Trinidad and Tobago) JCPC, and was carried live on the court's website.

The JCPC has framed its inquiry around three discrete legal questions concerning sections 13 and 16 of Trinidad and Tobago's Sexual Offences Act 1986 JCPC. First, whether those provisions merely repeal and re-enact sections 59, 60 and 61 of the 1925 Offences Against the Person Act — and so fall within the protection of section 6 of the Constitution, the "savings clause" that preserves pre-independence law from constitutional challenge. Second, whether the provisions infringe the fundamental rights guaranteed under section 4 of the Constitution. Third, whether the provisions are, in whole or in part, reasonably justifiable in a society with proper respect for individual rights and freedoms. The first question is the hinge on which the entire appeal turns: if the 1986 Act is found to have substantively re-enacted rather than merely consolidated the 1925 offences, the savings clause loses its shield, and the constitutional analysis proceeds unimpeded.

This is not a fresh dispute. Jones, now 61, first challenged the law criminalizing anal sex between consenting men in 2017 The Guardian. Justice Devindra Rampersad's High Court ruling of April 12, 2018, in CV 2017-00720, found the law breached Jones's constitutional rights to privacy and equality. That victory stood for seven years. On March 25, 2025, the Court of Appeal, in a judgment by Justice of Appeal Bereaux under reference CvA 18/P337, quashed the High Court's ruling following an intervention by the Attorney General. A further Court of Appeal decision on January 30, 2026 — CvA 24/S043, authored by Justice Aboud — noted the matter was already before the Privy Council, effectively pausing related proceedings pending London's verdict.

The savings-clause stakes

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, speaking to The Guardian at a Caribbean leaders' summit in St Lucia around July 7, framed the case in terms that extend well beyond sexual-offences law: she argued the JCPC's reasoning on the savings clause could destabilize the broader body of colonial-era statute that Caribbean constitutions preserved at independence. That is the crux of why Port of Spain is contesting the appeal so vigorously — a ruling that treats the 1986 re-enactment as substantively new legislation would narrow the savings clause's reach across the region, with consequences for any statute of comparable vintage that has since been amended or consolidated. Darrell Allahar, a minister in the Prime Minister's office and one of her lawyers on the case, called the hearing a "very good exercise" The Guardian.

For Jones, the argument is more direct: parliament had a decade to repeal the law and did not. Under the current statute, conviction carries up to five years' imprisonment for consensual same-sex intimacy. The Attorney General's decision to appeal the 2018 ruling — rather than let it stand — is itself part of what he has pointed to as evidence of institutional reluctance rather than legislative inertia.

The regional picture is uneven. The Bahamas decriminalized in 1991; the UK repealed anti-homosexuality statutes in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and Turks and Caicos in 2001; courts in Barbados, Dominica, St Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda have since struck down equivalent provisions. Grenada, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and St Vincent and the Grenadines still criminalize anal sex as of this month. A JCPC ruling against Trinidad and Tobago's government would not automatically bind those other jurisdictions, but as the region's apex constitutional court for several of them, its reasoning on savings clauses carries persuasive weight well beyond this single case.

The dispute over whether a 1986 statutory consolidation constitutes genuine re-enactment is a familiar one in common-law jurisprudence on savings clauses, and courts across the Commonwealth Caribbean have reached divergent conclusions on comparable questions. That divergence is precisely what gives this appeal its wider significance: a JCPC finding on the re-enactment point would offer the clearest guidance yet on how far savings clauses can be stretched to protect legislation that has been amended, consolidated or restated since independence.

An outcome is expected within three to six months of the hearing's start The Guardian. Until then, the 2025 Court of Appeal ruling — reinstating the buggery law — remains the operative legal position in Trinidad and Tobago.