A Privy Council ruling delivered in London on Tuesday struck down Trinidad and Tobago’s law criminalising consensual sexual relations between male same-sex couples, ending a legal challenge brought by a gay man who argued the statute breached his human rights. The court, which serves as the final court of appeal for the twin-island nation, found it unconstitutional for the law to “criminalise private, consensual sexual relations between adults of the same sex”, according to Reuters.
The claimant, Jason Jones, had challenged Trinidad and Tobago’s Sexual Offences Act – which made “buggery” and “gross indecency” illegal – as a breach of his fundamental rights under the country’s constitution. Jones was born in Trinidad and Tobago and now lives in Britain.
What the judges said in the Privy Council ruling
Judge Philip Sales announced the court’s decision, which was live-streamed, with Sales reading part of the unanimous judgment.
“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,” Sales said. “Laws which seek to criminalize such activities cannot be justified.”
Sales, of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, also said of the statutes: “Those laws cannot be regarded as reasonably justifiable in a society that has a proper respect for the rights and freedom of the individual,” The Associated Press reported, in an account carried by the Hindustan Times.
The Hindustan Times reported that the Privy Council ruling ended a nearly 10-year battle for gay rights in the twin-island nation and cannot be appealed.
A case that began in February 2017
Jones filed the case in February 2017, arguing that so-called “buggery” laws dating from the period when Trinidad and Tobago was a British colony are unconstitutional. The laws call for up to five years in prison and have not been enforced in recent history, but critics say they still send a message.
In April 2018, Trinidad’s High Court found the laws unconstitutional. A local appeals court partially reversed that ruling in March 2025, with a majority of justices finding that the High Court erred by allowing judges to change a law. Trinidad’s Court of Appeals later allowed Jones to seek a ruling from the Privy Council in England. Trinidad and Tobago’s government had sought a ruling that would uphold the March 2025 decision.
Reuters reported that Jones had initially won his case at Trinidad and Tobago’s High Court in 2018, but that ruling was overturned, prompting Jones to go to the Privy Council, which ruled that the law was unconstitutional.
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. The country has pushed for the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice to replace the Privy Council. A provision in some Caribbean constitutions protects colonial laws from legal challenges, including in Trinidad and Tobago.
Jason Jones calls the judgment a “stunning victory”
In an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Jones said he was celebrating what he called a “stunning victory.” He described himself as “a very angry gay man” and said he used that anger to power himself through the case as it made its way through the courts for almost a decade.
“Society has treated me worse than a criminal,” he said. “There is a real sense of vindication with this judgment. Finally, the courts are seeing that they need to step up because our politicians are so toothless.”
Jones said he loves his country and is not angry with its people, but rather its laws. “To discriminate against somebody simply because of who they choose to love is simply ridiculous,” he said by phone, adding that the ruling is a stepping stone in the fight for equality. “Why do people feel they have the right to pass judgment on anybody else?”
Speaking to Reuters, Jones welcomed the ruling but added that it did not address wider issues of “human rights and equality for LGBTQ+ people which have been denied using British colonial era laws across the Commonwealth and beyond.”
Leaving Trinidad in 1996 and an encounter with Nina Simone
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. He said he was a singer in church as well as an actor and a dancer. “Anybody along those lines who was not following the macho rules was treated as a pariah,” he recalled.
He told the AP that he was inspired to speak out after losing friends to HIV/AIDS and after meeting Nina Simone, the American singer, songwriter, composer and civil rights activist, who had travelled to the twin-island nation in 1984 for Carnival. He said he was 19 and spent three weeks with her. “Nina was the one who said, ‘Jason, get off this rock and go see the world,'” he recalled, calling it a defining, life-changing experience.
Who opposed the challenge
Those who opposed Jones include Trinidad and Tobago’s government, the country’s Council of Evangelical Churches and its largest Hindu organisation, Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha. The office of Trinidad and Tobago’s Attorney General, which opposed Jones’ appeal, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported. The Hindustan Times reported that Trinidad’s attorney general did not immediately return messages seeking comment, and that the Council of Evangelical Churches said it did not have immediate comment.
Where gay sex bans still stand in the region
Reuters described the Privy Council ruling as the latest concerning LGBT rights in the Caribbean, where some nations still have laws forbidding intimacy between people of the same sex, a legacy of British colonial-era statutes.
- Caribbean nations with so-called buggery laws still on the books include Grenada, Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
- The Bahamas decriminalized homosexuality in 1991.
- 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.
- Judges have recently struck down similar laws in Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda.
The Hindustan Times reported that activists around the world celebrated the decision striking down the centuries-old ban.
