Privy Council overturns Trinidad and Tobago same-sex laws

London's Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has overturned laws criminalising same-sex intimacy in Trinidad and Tobago, according to BBC News. The court ruled that the laws were not in keeping with the fundamental individual right to respect for private and family life. The judgment was unanimous in favour of Jason Jones, a 62-year-old dual citizen who brought the challenge.

The Judicial Committee sits in London and serves as Trinidad and Tobago's final court of appeal, the last court a case from the Caribbean country can reach. The case was an 11-year legal battle. Jones first succeeded in Trinidad's High Court in 2018, but the Trinidadian government appealed, and that ruling was overturned.

The decision is the first time the Judicial Committee has decided a case to decriminalise same-sex intimacy, meaning to remove criminal penalties for it. Before the ruling, Trinidad and Tobago was one of about 34 Commonwealth countries that still criminalised homosexuality under colonial-era British laws.

The central dispute turned on the wording of the laws' origins. Trinidad and Tobago's Attorney General argued that the laws were protected by savings clauses, provisions that carried existing British laws over into newly independent states. Jones's representatives argued that changes made in 1986, which introduced stricter punishments, meant those savings clause protections no longer applied.