The courtroom in London carried the faint echo of old empire. On 8 July 2026, five Law Lords of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council listened as lawyers for Jason Jones argued that sections 13 and 16 of Trinidad and Tobago's Sexual Offences Act 1986 should fall. The provisions ban buggery and certain sexual acts outside heterosexual intercourse between consenting adults over 16 in private. No judgment came that day. It rarely does. The weight of it hangs somewhere in the weeks or months ahead.
I have sat through enough of these hearings to recognise the choreography. Jones first filed his claim back in February 2017. A High Court judge in 2018 agreed the laws breached rights to privacy and equality. Then the Court of Appeal in March 2025 overturned that ruling, invoking the savings clause in the constitution. The 1986 provisions, it said, were merely re-enactments of pre-independence law and therefore protected. Now the final appeal has reached the old colonial courthouse in Westminster, asking whether those sections infringe section 4 rights, whether the savings clause applies, and whether the restrictions remain reasonably justifiable in a society that still claims respect for individual dignity.
The respondents include the Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago, the Equal Opportunity Commission, and the Trinidad and Tobago Council of Evangelical Churches. Interveners on the other side range from Colours Caribbean to ILGA-NAC and several regional LGBT advocacy groups. The lines are drawn between those who see the statutes as an anchor for traditional order and those who view them as colonial relics that shame a modern democracy.
At a Caribbean leaders' summit in St Lucia this month, former prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar captured something of the deeper unease.
This ruling is going to be a very profound decision, not just impacting on sodomy laws but that whole issue of the saving clause. We have a lot of colonial laws that were saved, so this will give us guidance as to which ones we keep, which ones we don’t keep.Her words carry the quiet acknowledgment that more than one statute could shift if the Privy Council decides the savings clause no longer shields these particular prohibitions.
Anand Ramlogan, speaking during the proceedings, offered the counterpoint favoured by activists.
Constitutional rights exist precisely because majorities are not always right. They ensure that the dignity and equality of every citizen are not left to the changing tides of public opinion.The sentiment sounds noble until you pause over who defines dignity and which public opinion counts when the society in question still draws its moral grammar from Christian teaching and inherited custom.
Trinidad and Tobago is not Britain. It retained the Privy Council as its highest court after independence, a choice that now leaves its legislature and people subject to judicial review in a foreign capital. The appeal is more than a legal technicality. It is an attempt to leverage an external tribunal to rewrite standards that many in the Caribbean still regard as protective of family, of childhood, and of a cultural inheritance that predates the latest wave of ideological export. Progressive voices frame this as liberation from colonial hangover. Others see it as the newest form of ideological colonialism, one that dismisses the right of a sovereign people to legislate according to their own lights.
