Trinidad and Tobago’s Ban on Gay Sex Struck Down by UK Court
WHO:
ABC News - Jones said he had been openly gay since age 16.
BBC News - Jason Jones, a dual citizen, brought the legal challenge against Trinidad and Tobago’s anti-homosexuality laws.
ABC News - Jones is an LGBTQ+ rights activist who left Trinidad and Tobago in 1996; he said he had experienced homophobic violence and discrimination.
ABC News - Judge Philip James Sales read the unanimous Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decision.
ABC News - Opponents of Jones’s challenge included Trinidad and Tobago’s government, its Council of Evangelical Churches and Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, the country’s largest Hindu organization.
CNN - Ria Mohammed, an attorney and director of the Caribbean Centre for Human Rights, discussed the laws’ colonial origins and their continuing legal effect.
WHAT:
ABC News - Judge Philip James Sales said the laws criminalized activities that express a core part of an individual’s identity, including sexual orientation and private sexual activity between consenting adults.
ABC News - Trinidad and Tobago’s government asked the Privy Council to uphold the local appeals court’s ruling; a majority of justices had found in 2025 that the High Court erred by allowing judges to change a law.
ABC News - Other Caribbean countries with buggery laws still on the books include Grenada, Jamaica, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The Bahamas decriminalized homosexuality in 1991; the UK repealed such laws in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands in 2001. Judges have also struck down similar laws in Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Antigua and Barbuda.
CNN - England decriminalized gay sex in the 1960s. 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 Human Dignity Trust.
CNN - Five countries—Belize, Guyana, Barbados, Saint Lucia, and Dominica—have replaced the Privy Council with the Caribbean Court of Justice as their final court of appeal.
ABC News - The UK’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council struck down Trinidad and Tobago’s gay-sex ban; its ruling ended Jones’s legal challenge and cannot be appealed.
ABC News - The court said laws criminalizing private sexual activity between consenting adults could not be justified and were not reasonably justifiable in a society respecting individual rights and freedoms.
ABC News - The laws provided for up to five years in prison and had not been enforced in recent history, though critics said they continued to send a message.
CNN - The challenged provisions provided for up to five years in prison for “buggery” and two years for “gross indecency.”
ABC News - Trinidad and Tobago’s High Court ruled the laws unconstitutional; a local appeals court partially reversed that ruling, after which Jones sought a final appeal.
WHERE:
ABC News - The article was filed from San Juan, Puerto Rico.
ABC News - The case concerned Trinidad and Tobago, a twin-island sovereign republic in the British Commonwealth; its final appeal was heard in England.
CNN - The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is based in London and remains the highest appeals court for several former British colonies.
WHEN:
BBC News - The case concluded an 11-year legal battle.
ABC News - Jones filed his case in February 2017; the High Court ruled in April 2018, and the local appeals court ruled in March 2025.
CNN - The British Empire enacted a version of the law in Trinidad and Tobago through a 1925 act; the country changed its sexual-offences laws in 1986.
WHY:
CNN - Jones said he filed the lawsuit to start a movement toward equality and raise awareness of how homophobia is used to undermine democratic rights.
HOW:
CNN - Jones’s lawyers argued that the measures introduced in 1986 were distinct from the 1925 colonial-era provisions and therefore were not protected by the savings-law clause.
CNN - Ria Mohammed said a ruling would be binding in Trinidad and Tobago, but that other jurisdictions within the Privy Council appellate structure were unlikely to be treated differently in similar cases.
CNN - A “savings law” clause shielding pre-independence laws from constitutional challenges helped keep the ban in place after independence.
ABC News - Trinidad and Tobago has retained the Privy Council as its final court of appeal, while advocating for the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice to replace it.
(UPDATED November 11, 2026 01:06 UTC)
The Privy Council struck down Trinidad and Tobago’s ban on gay sex, ending a long legal battle. Activist Jason Jones challenged laws criminalizing private, consensual intimacy, which carried prison sentences. The unanimous ruling says those laws violate individual rights and freedoms.
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(UPDATED November 10, 2026 22:04 UTC)
Trinidad and Tobago’s Privy Council struck down its ban on gay sex, ending a landmark legal challenge. The unanimous ruling protects private, consensual intimacy from criminalization. Activist Jason Jones brought the case, challenging laws rooted in the colonial era.
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(UPDATED November 10, 2026 19:06 UTC)
Trinidad and Tobago’s highest appeals court has struck down its ban on gay sex. The unanimous ruling ends activist Jason Jones’s eleven-year challenge, and cannot be appealed. The court said criminalizing consenting adults’ private relationships violates individual rights and freedoms.