UK's Privy Council strikes down Trinidad and Tobago's colonial-era gay sex ban

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Britain's final court of appeal for Trinidad and Tobago, ruled Tuesday that the country's laws criminalizing consensual same-sex relations between adults are unconstitutional, reviving a 2018 trial court decision that had been overturned on appeal.

In The Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago v Jason Jones, five justices unanimously allowed the appeal brought by Jones, a gay rights activist, and dismissed the attorney general's cross-appeal. The full judgment, also published on the legal database BAILII under the citation [2026] UKPC 38, was handed down a little more than four months after the case was argued in London on July 8.

What the law said

Sections 13 and 16 of Trinidad and Tobago's Sexual Offences Act 1986 prohibit "buggery" and other sex acts outside a narrow exception for heterosexual couples. Jones had argued the provisions breached his right to respect for private and family life under the country's constitution. A High Court judge agreed in 2018, but Trinidad and Tobago's Court of Appeal later reversed that ruling, finding the sections were shielded from constitutional challenge as a re-enactment of older colonial-era law.

The Privy Council disagreed, finding that the 1986 Act represented a comprehensive new legal regime rather than a simple carryover of a 1925 law, and that it remained open to challenge on whether it stayed "reasonably justifiable in a society that respects individual rights and freedoms" — judged against the present day, not 1986. The justices found that criminalizing private same-sex relations strikes at a fundamental part of personal identity, and that the attorney general had relied only on tradition and the law's long standing, without evidence it still matched current social values.

The ruling leaves one procedural step outstanding: the Board asked for further written submissions on how to modify the two sections, saying its provisional view is that the original 2018 High Court order should stand. Trinidad and Tobago is one of several Caribbean nations whose criminal codes still carry sodomy laws inherited from British colonial rule; courts in Belize, Antigua and Barbuda and elsewhere in the region have struck down similar statutes in recent years.