Caribbean Matters is a weekly sequence from Day by day Kos. Hope you’ll be part of us right here each Saturday. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, try Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
On March 25, there was disturbing information from Trinidad & Tobago: the victory gained within the courts repealing legal guidelines in opposition to 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 year [2018], the Excessive Court docket 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 unlawful” as a result of they violate the rights to privateness and freedom of expression.
“What I believe the decide identified was ‘right here each creed and race discover an equal place,’ and I believe we should all come collectively now and embrace one another in real love and respect,” Jones mentioned on the time.
However on March 25, the Court docket of Appeals reversed that call, saying that solely Parliament can overturn the nation’s ban on homosexuality. The Court docket 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 happened within the first place:
Queer folks suffered an unlimited and shocking setback on Wednesday when the Court docket of Enchantment 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 grew to become a part of the vanguard 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 circumstances nonetheless pending in Grenada and St Lucia. Round this time, these rulings have been mirrored in court docket selections 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 part of a growing trend:
The gradual, 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 Court docket of Enchantment to reinstate that Caribbean country’s laws against homosexuality.
Due to an early 2025 adoption of a new homophobic penal code by the West African nation of Mali, the full variety of nations with anti-homosexuality laws now stands at 66.
Earlier than these reversals, the variety of nations with legal guidelines in opposition to homosexual intercourse had fallen to 64 from greater than 90 in the beginning of the 2000s. The most recent nations 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 Cook 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 in opposition to the LGBTQ+ group. Jones defined that many Trinidadians didn’t understand these legal guidelines existed or may very well be used in opposition to 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 hire a resort room.
On April 12, 2018, he gained a landmark authorized problem on the Excessive Court docket of Trinidad and Tobago which decriminalised grownup identical intercourse intimacy. This win assured freedom for practically 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 a minimum of 10 different nations throughout two continents.
“The one solution to change hearts and minds is to alter legal guidelines. Except you’ve got legal guidelines that shield minority communities, there’s no method you possibly 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:
Court docket of Enchantment Justices Nolan Bereaux and Charmaine Pemberton overturned it on March 25. The Day by 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 once more makes me an unapprehended legal within the eyes of the regulation,” mentioned Jones in an announcement he posted to social media. “The TT Court docket of Enchantment has successfully put a goal on the again of LGBTQIA+ folks and made us decrease class residents in our personal nation.”
Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, and Dominica are among the many nations 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 adjustments.
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. […]
Dealing with 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 prime 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 comparable legal guidelines that always search lengthy jail sentences.
The ruling said Antigua’s 1995 Sexual Offences Act “offends the proper to liberty, safety of the regulation, freedom of expression, safety of private privateness and safety from discrimination on the premise of intercourse.”
Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne advised the AP that his authorities determined to not problem the ruling: “We revered the truth that there needs to be no discrimination inside society,” he mentioned. “As a authorities, now we have a constitutional duty to respect the rights of all and to not discriminate.”
David’s case was additionally coated on this video by the Related Press:
This is a matter we’ve coated here in the past. 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+ beneath the vile Trump anti-diversity, fairness, and inclusion and deportation campaigns isn’t simple. It’s as much as all of us to battle again, and to be extra conscious of battles being fought each right here and in our neighboring nations.
Please be part of me within the feedback part beneath, and put up hyperlinks to activist teams you’re conscious of, are a part of, otherwise you assist.
