Jason Jones says he has lost family and friends since he began his campaign in 2015. Photograph: supplied View image in fullscreen Jason Jones says he has lost family and friends since he began his campaign in 2015. Photograph: supplied Trinidad and Tobago ‘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
Prefer the Guardian on Google A n 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 and its slave trade began in 1562. Slavery was abolished in 1807 but we are still fighting. We are the only people still criminalised for our protected identities,” said Jones. “I began this journey in 2015. It’s been lonely. I’ve lost all my family and most of my friends. People said I was crazy and it was impossible.”
Jones has, however, won many new friends and supporters along the way. His 2018 victory inspired Trinidad’s inaugural pride event and legal challenges by activists in other countries, notably India. Six Caribbean LGBTQ+ organisations have entered submissions supporting his case.
The laws date back to the reign of Henry VIII, when a medieval ecclesiastical law was passed after the break with Rome into civil law, making “the detestable and abominable vice of buggery” subject to the death penalty. Britain abolished the law in 1967 and has since pardoned gay men prosecuted under it. But it remains in place in many former British territories – a legacy that Jones says affects people’s everyday lives and forced him to leave his homeland in the 1980s and settle in London.
Jones began his case against his country incensed by broken promises to tackle homophobia at the 2015 Commonwealth heads of government meeting. He had the backing of the late Jonathan Cooper, a former colleague of Keir Starmer, whose Human Dignity Trust set the ball rolling.
View image in fullscreen Supporters of LGBTQ+ rights in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 2018. Photograph: Sean Drakes/Getty Images “I’m nothing special,” Jones told a meeting at parliament in May, convened by the MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy and attended by lawyers and LGBTQ+ activists, including the former Love Island winner Amber Rose Gill, whose father is Trinidadian. “I dropped out of college. I survived HIV. All I am is a very angry gay man. I think about all the friends and lovers I’ve lost over the last 40 years. This is a dream we c…