Caribbean Issues is a weekly sequence from Every day Kos. Hope you’ll be part of us right here each Saturday. In case you are unfamiliar with the area, take a look at Caribbean Issues: Attending to know the international locations of the Caribbean.
On March 25, there was disturbing information from Trinidad & Tobago: the victory gained within the courts repealing legal guidelines towards homosexuality in 2018 has simply been reversed. There have been a flurry of articles reporting this from LBGTQ+ publications and organizations, although not a lot within the mainstream U.S. media.
Alex Bollinger at LGBTQ Nation reported:
That 12 months [2018], the Excessive Courtroom within the Christian-majority nation dominated in a lawsuit introduced by LGBTQ+ activist Jason Jones that Sections 13 and 16 of the Sexual Offenses Act are “irrational and illegal” as a result of they violate the rights to privateness and freedom of expression.
“What I think the judge pointed out was ‘here every creed and race find an equal place,’ and I think we must all come together now and embrace each other in true love and respect,” Jones mentioned on the time.
However on March 25, the Courtroom of Appeals reversed that call, saying that solely Parliament can overturn the nation’s ban on homosexuality. The Courtroom of Appeals additionally diminished the utmost sentence related to homosexuality to 5 years in jail. Previous to 2018, the utmost penalty was 25 years in jail.
LGBTQ+ rights journalist Rob Salerno, an editor for Erasing 76 Crimes posted how this occurred within the first place:
Queer folks suffered an infinite and stunning setback on Wednesday when the Courtroom of Attraction overturned the 2018 ruling that struck down the Caribbean nation’s legal guidelines banning homosexual intercourse. I’m going to attempt to break down what occurred right here.
In 2017, UK-based Trinidadian activist Jason Jones filed a problem to the nation’s buggery and critical indecency legal guidelines – the legal guidelines which successfully ban homosexual intercourse, in addition to oral and anal intercourse between straight folks. A 12 months later, a court docket on the island dominated in his favor, discovering that the legal guidelines have been unconstitutional insofar as they utilized to consensual acts in personal.
Trinidad turned a part of the forefront of a wave of authorized challenges that noticed legal guidelines banning homosexual intercourse struck down throughout the area. Belize had preceded it in 2016; shortly after the ruling, a coordinated set of authorized challenges have been launched in all the different former British colonies within the Caribbean islands. By 2024, activists had gained challenges to sodomy legal guidelines in Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Barbados – with instances nonetheless pending in Grenada and St Lucia. Round this time, these rulings have been mirrored in court docket choices hanging down anti-gay legal guidelines in different former UK colonies, together with Mauritius, Botswana, and India, making them half of a bigger world pattern.
Erasing 76 Crimes editor Colin Stewart wrote about how these anti-gay legal guidelines are a part of a rising pattern:
The sluggish, decades-long progress towards recognition of the human rights of LGBTQ folks has encountered a setback with the March 25 resolution by the Trinidad and Tobago Courtroom of Attraction to reinstate that Caribbean nation’s legal guidelines towards homosexuality.
Due to an early 2025 adoption of a brand new homophobic penal code by the West African nation of Mali, the overall variety of nations with anti-homosexuality legal guidelines now stands at 66.
Earlier than these reversals, the variety of nations with legal guidelines towards homosexual intercourse had fallen to 64 from greater than 90 initially of the 2000s. The most recent international locations to finish the criminalization of same-sex intimacy are Namibia in Africa and Dominica within the Caribbean in 2024, Mauritius within the Indian Ocean and the Prepare dinner Islands within the South Pacific in 2023, following within the footsteps of Singapore in Southeast Asia, Antigua & Barbuda, Saint Kitts & Nevis, and Barbados within the Caribbean — all in 2022.
The Trinidad and Tobago case is now being appealed to the Privy Council in London, UK, Trinidad and Tobago’s highest court docket.
One of many strongest voices combating for LBGTQ+ rights within the Caribbean is that of Jason Jones, profiled in January 2025 for the Caribbean Collective by Tiara Jade Chutkhan:
Jones, who was born in Trinidad is the son of an English mom and Trinidadian father and playfully refers to himself as “Tringlish.”… With Trinidad’s anti-gay setting, in 1985 on the age of 21, Jones relocated to London the place he studied theatre and appearing. […]
It was in 2017 that Jones would tackle his largest venture but. He started engaged on repealing all laws within the Caribbean that discriminated towards the LGBTQ+ group. Jones defined that many Trinidadians didn’t understand these legal guidelines existed or could possibly be used towards them. Among the legal guidelines included members of the LGBTQ+ group being denied entry into Trinidad and two folks of the identical intercourse not being allowed to lease a resort room.
On April 12, 2018, he gained a landmark authorized problem on the Excessive Courtroom of Trinidad and Tobago which decriminalised grownup similar intercourse intimacy. This win assured freedom for almost 100,000 Trinidadians and set a precedent. The case was additionally cited in a current case that led to a decriminalisation victory in India.
Come 2025, Jones will stand earlier than the UK’s Privy council for LGBTQ+ decriminalisation. His victory there’ll help decriminalisation in not less than 10 different international locations throughout two continents.
“The only way to change hearts and minds is to change laws. Unless you have laws that protect minority communities, there’s no way you can break this deeply-entrenched-hundreds-and-hundreds-of-years of homophobic ideology,” Jones says.
Michael Okay. Lavers, the worldwide information editor of the Washington Blade wrote:
Courtroom of Attraction Justices Nolan Bereaux and Charmaine Pemberton overturned it on March 25. The Every day Specific newspaper reported Justice Vasheist Kokaram dissented.
“As an LGBTQ+ citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, this regressive judgement has ripped up my contract as a citizen of T&T and again makes me an unapprehended criminal in the eyes of the law,” mentioned Jones in an announcement he posted to social media. “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.”
Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, and Dominica are among the many international locations which have decriminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations in recent times.
Victories nonetheless stand in different nations within the Caribbean and there are different activists, like Orden David, who’ve additionally fought laborious for these modifications.
For years, Orden David was persecuted in his native Antigua and Barbuda — a frequent criticism by many LGBTQ individuals who worry for his or her security throughout the conservative and largely Christian Caribbean, the place anti-gay hostility is widespread. […]
Going through ostracism and risking his life as the general public face of the LGBTQ motion, David took his authorities to court docket in 2022 to demand an finish to his nation’s anti-sodomy regulation.
Final 12 months, a high Caribbean court docket dominated that the anti-sodomy provision of Antigua’s sexual offenses act was unconstitutional. LGBTQ-rights activists say David’s effort, with the assistance of native and regional advocacy teams, has set a precedent for a rising variety of Caribbean islands. For the reason that ruling, St. Kitts & Nevis and Barbados, have struck down related legal guidelines that usually search lengthy jail sentences.
The ruling mentioned Antigua’s 1995 Sexual Offences Act “offends the right to liberty, protection of the law, freedom of expression, protection of personal privacy and protection from discrimination on the basis of sex.”
Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne instructed the AP that his authorities determined to not problem the ruling: “We respected the fact that there should be no discrimination within society,” he mentioned. “As a government, we have a constitutional responsibility to respect the rights of all and not to discriminate.”
David’s case was additionally lined on this video by the Related Press:
This is a matter we’ve lined right here up to now. You will need to observe that members of the LGBTQ+ Caribbean group right here within the states additionally face challenges, for instance, this information story documented by CBS Information in New York final 12 months:
To be Indo or Afro Caribbean immigrants, kids of immigrants right here within the states, and to be brazenly LGBTQ+ below the vile Trump anti-diversity, fairness, and inclusion and deportation campaigns isn’t straightforward. It’s as much as all of us to combat again, and to be extra conscious of battles being fought each right here and in our neighboring international locations.
Please be part of me within the feedback part under, and publish hyperlinks to activist teams you’re conscious of, are a part of, otherwise you help.
