Same-sex intimacyis not a crime.How Jason Jones defeated Trinidad and Tobago’s law

When the Privy Council ruled on Tuesday that Trinidad and Tobago could no longer criminalise private sexual intimacy between consenting adults of the same sex, much of the coverage reached for a familiar story: a British court clearing away a British colonial law. The judgment itself tells a more uncomfortable one. The provisions that Jason Jones challenged were written in Port of Spain in 1986, a decade after the country became a republic, and they did more than preserve an old offence. Parliament rebuilt the law of sexual offences, kept the prohibition on private intimacy and raised the penalties attached to it.1

Five justices of the Judicial Committee were unanimous. They allowed Jones’s appeal, dismissed the Attorney General’s cross-appeal, and held that sections 13 and 16 of the Sexual Offences Act 1986 could neither shelter behind the Constitution’s savings clause nor be justified under its test of what is reasonable in a society that respects individual rights. The Board has not yet issued its final order on how the provisions will be modified, and will first receive written submissions from both sides.12

A law made at home

England and Wales began dismantling their own prohibition in 1967, when private acts between consenting men over 21 were partly decriminalised, although that reform did not extend to the colonies and stopped well short of equality. In Trinidad and Tobago the question before the courts was narrower and more technical: whether the 1986 provisions were simply the old law in a new form, and therefore protected as law that existed before the 1976 Constitution came into force.191

The judgment sets the two side by side. Under the 1925 Offences Against the Person Act, as it stood in 1976, buggery carried a maximum of five years’ imprisonment and gross indecency between men two. The 1986 Act doubled the maximum for buggery between adults to ten years, introduced a new offence of serious indecency carrying five years, and for the first time brought women within its reach, while exempting private acts between a consenting man and woman. In 2012 the Children Act raised the maximum for buggery to twenty-five years.1

Inside the 1986 debate

The most detailed account of how legislators approached the Bill comes from Yasmin Tambiah, whose 2009 study for the University of the West Indies drew on transcripts of the debates supplied to her by Parliament. She dates the second reading in the House to between 21 February and 5 March 1986, and in the Senate to 4 November. The Act came into force on 14 November that year.1112

Tambiah records the Minister responsible cautioning the House that the criminal law should not try to punish everything considered immoral, even as the Bill retained the prohibition on buggery. She also notes that the Law Reform Commission and the Bar Council had recommended a different course. Her account is drawn from those transcripts; I have not examined the original records myself, and the quotations here are hers.11

The judgment reaches its own view of what Parliament did. It quotes Justice of Appeal Vasheist Kokaram’s description of a legislature that chose to break with the past and modernise the law of sexual offences, and at paragraphs 37 and 38 concludes that the 1986 Act was a comprehensive new regime rather than a revision of the old one. That finding proved decisive, because a law the country wrote for itself cannot claim the protection the Constitution gives to laws it inherited.1

The man behind the claim

Jones was born in Port of Spain in 1964 and has been openly gay since he was sixteen. He left for England in 1996, returned to live in Trinidad between 2010 and 2014, and then left again. He filed his constitutional claim on 23 February 2017. In his affidavit, which the judgment summarises, he described almost daily abuse, avoiding public transport for fear of his safety, being attacked while performing as a singer and living with the knowledge that he could be arrested. The Attorney General filed no evidence in reply, and his account went unchallenged.14

Prosecutions under the provisions were rare, but the courts accepted that the law’s existence shaped how Jones was treated and how he lived. Speaking after the ruling, he told reporters from the Associated Press and The Guardian what the decade-long case had cost him and what the result meant.68

From the High Court to London

Justice Devindra Rampersad found in Jones’s favour in April 2018 and, that September, modified the provisions so they no longer applied to consenting adults. In March 2025 the Court of Appeal reversed him by a majority. Justices of Appeal Bereaux and Pemberton held that the savings clause protected the substance of the earlier law; Justice Kokaram dissented. All three agreed, however, that the provisions could not be justified where they went beyond the old law, and the majority restored the earlier penalties of five years for buggery and two for gross indecency.14

The Privy Council rejected the majority’s reasoning on the savings clause for eight separate reasons. Section 6(2) of the Constitution, it held, protects existing law that has been repealed and re-enacted with modifications, and must be read narrowly. Where Parliament has reviewed a body of law afresh and replaced it, the purpose of that protection has largely been served, and the new law must answer to the fundamental rights in the Constitution like any other.1

The State’s second line of defence rested on section 13 of the Constitution, which allows Parliament, by a special majority, to pass laws that are inconsistent with fundamental rights. The 1986 Act was passed that way. But the section still requires such a law to be reasonably justifiable, and the Attorney General argued that this should be judged by the standards of 1986. The Board disagreed. Rights must be practical and effective in the present, it said, and the democratic weight of a vote taken four decades ago, by a Parliament elected by a substantially different electorate, diminishes with time.1

No evidence for tradition

On the question of justification itself, the State’s case was thin. The Attorney General filed no evidence and relied instead on the argument that the provisions reflected traditional laws of long standing. The Board said that an argument from tradition would need evidence of how strong that tradition was and whether it remained consistent with the values of society today. None was put before the court.1

Even if preserving such a tradition were accepted as a legitimate aim, the Board held, the interference with Jones’s private life was too severe to be justified. The judgment describes the ability to form a deep connection with another person through an intimate and loving relationship as a vital interest for all human beings, and recognises that Jones’s relationship with another man engages the Constitution’s protection of family life.1

What happens next

The Board has said its provisional view is that Justice Rampersad’s 2018 order should stand, describing it as an elegant solution that makes clear there is no crime where the parties are consenting adults. Jones’s counsel, Anand Ramlogan, has asked the Board instead to strike sections 13 and 16 out entirely, and both sides will make further written submissions before a final order is made.12

The ruling does not alter the law on non-consensual sexual offences or offences against children, and it says nothing about marriage. Its reach is the criminal law’s treatment of consenting adults in private, and on that question it is unequivocal.1

Across the Caribbean

Jones has predicted a domino effect across countries that still send their final appeals to the Privy Council. Legally, the judgment binds only Trinidad and Tobago, and each country in the region has its own statutes and its own constitutional history. Guyana, which still criminalises sex between men, takes its final appeals to the Caribbean Court of Justice.817

According to profiles published by the Human Dignity Trust in October, similar provisions remain on the books in Jamaica, Guyana, Grenada and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where a constitutional challenge failed in 2024. Courts in Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Barbados struck down their laws in 2022, and Saint Lucia followed in 2025. Where the old laws survive, they are rarely enforced, but they have not been repealed.1314151618

A question for this country

CNN, the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and The Guardian have all reported the ruling, and Derek Achong of the Trinidad Guardian has followed the case through the local courts. The arguments themselves can be heard in full in the Privy Council’s recordings of the July hearing, and the judgment is reproduced in the Document Room alongside the other sources cited here.5678910

07 / THE EVIDENCE

The arguments, in the court’s own recording.

Morning hearingAfternoon hearing

Official appeal hearing, 8 July 2026 — not the November judgment delivery. No duration or time-coded claim is supplied without verification. 3

Much will be said about Britain’s role in exporting these laws, and it is a fair point. But the Board’s central finding is that the law Jones challenged was Trinidad and Tobago’s own, written by its Parliament after independence and defended by its Attorney General without evidence. The Constitution that Parliament adopted in 1976 promised every citizen dignity and respect for private and family life. It took a citizen who had twice left the country to hold the State to that promise.1