‘A very angry gay man’: activist’s 11-year fight to overturn Trinidad’s homophobic laws reaches final hurdle

Privy council in London to decide on Jason Jones’s challenge to legislation against same-sex intimacy An LGBTQ+ rights activist will make legal history this week when his decade-long battle to remove Trinidad’s homophobic laws culminates at the privy council in London, which remains the Caribbean island’s final court of appeal. When Jason Jones takes his case to its judicial committee, it will be the first time that judges at the centuries-old British institution have ever decided a case to decriminalise same-sex intimacy – in this case ruling on sections of Trinidadian law that derive from the “buggery law” introduced by the UK to its colonies during the British empire. Those archaic laws, officially enacted in Trinidad in 1925 and carried into its 1986 Sexual Offences Act, were struck from the statute book in 2018, when the high court judge Devindra Rampersad ruled that they infringed upon Jones’s right under Trinidad’s constitution to privacy and equality before the law. But the landmark ruling was challenged by the then Trinidadian government and overturned on appeal, recriminalising anal sex between consenting men. “Britain’s Buggery Act was enacted in 1533