Trinidad and Tobago’s top court overturns ban on consensual same-sex intimacy

The UK’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has overturned Trinidad and Tobago’s laws criminalising consensual same-sex intimacy, ruling they breach the right to respect for private and family life. The unanimous decision ends an 11-year legal challenge by Jason Jones and could encourage similar cases elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

Jones first succeeded in challenging the laws in Trinidad’s High Court in 2018, but the government appealed successfully. The Attorney General argued that legal protections for inherited colonial laws prevented the challenge; Jones’s lawyers said later amendments had removed those protections. Before the ruling, Trinidad and Tobago was among about 34 Commonwealth countries that still criminalised homosexuality.