LGBTQ+ activist vows to appeal ruling on TT’s buggery laws

News

LGBTQ+ activist Jason Jones has vowed to challenge the ruling of the Court of Appeal, which upheld the criminal status of buggery and serious indecency while reducing penalties for the offences.

Jones expressed his disappointment with the March 25 ruling, calling it “regressive” and a setback for LGBTQ+ rights in TT.

“As an LGBTQ+ citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, this regressive judgment has ripped up my contract as a citizen of T&T and again makes me an unapprehended criminal in the eyes of the law,” Jones said in a statement.

He criticised the judges’ reliance on the "savings clause" in the Constitution, arguing that it perpetuates colonial-era laws that discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals.

"The savings clause has no place in a 21st-century democracy, and the Government and our Parliament are derelict in their duties by not removing it so many years after we became a Republic in 1976," he said.

>

Jones said he intends to take the case to the Privy Council.

“The TT Court of Appeal has effectively put a target on the back of LGBTQIA + people and made us lower-class citizens in our own country.

“Let me be clear, for our Appeal Court judges to overturn one of the most progressive human rights judgments in recent history is nothing short of diabolical.”

He praised Justice Devindra Rampersad’s initial ruling on his constitutional challenge in 2918, calling it “groundbreaking.”

The Court of Appeal’s majority decision was delivered in a 196-page ruling.

Justices of Appeal Nolan Bereaux and Charmaine Pemberton upheld an appeal by the Attorney General, maintaining the criminalisation of buggery while reducing its penalty from 25 years to five years of imprisonment. Justice Vashiest Kokaram dissented.

The ruling also modified provisions of the act concerning "serious indecency," effectively decriminalising consensual acts between adults, including same-sex intimacy, under those provisions. However, the judges reinstated Section 61 of the Offences Against the Person Act (1925), preserving legal prohibitions against acts of gross indecency, punishable by up to two years in prison.

The judges stated that it was Parliament’s responsibility to decide whether buggery and gross indecency should be fully decriminalised, rather than a matter for judicial intervention.

"Judges cannot change the law. We give effect to Parliament’s intention," the ruling stated. "It is, therefore, left to Parliament to repeal the criminalisation of buggery and the related offence of gross indecency by legislation."

>

Bereaux said buggery remains a crime under Section 13, while Pemberton noted that legal reforms should come through Parliament.

Jones, who originally challenged the laws in 2017, remains determined to see them struck down.

“These laws are inhumane and single out my community for hatred and derision. They will go!” he declared.

He pointed to similar legal victories worldwide, including the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India, where Justice Rampersad’s 2018 ruling had been cited as a precedent.

“The modernisation of our democracy is at stake here, and this is the beginning of this modernisation,” he stated.

Fyard Hosein, SC, Keisha Prosper and Vincent Jardine represented the Attorney General. Richard Drabble KC, Rishi Dass, SC, and Marina Narinesingh represented Jones.

The Equal Opportunity Commission had a listening brief. John Jeremie, SC, represented the Council of Evangelical Churches, an interested party in the appeal.