BUGGERY LAW SHOWDOWN

Gay-rights activist Maurice Tomlinson has expressed optimism about buggery law reform in Jamaica following the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’s (JCPC) decision to decriminalise same-sex intimacy in Trinidad and Tobago.

“This is a wonderful development not only for my case against Jamaica’s archaic anti-buggery law but also for regional human rights. One of the Caribbean’s final courts has struck down a vestige of our dark colonial past that kept our citizens in bondage,” he told The Gleaner hours after the judgment was handed down on Tuesday.

The JCPC, the final appellate court of Trinidad and Tobago, ruled that the island’s anti-buggery laws violate fundamental rights and must be interpreted subject to the Constitution to make it clear that they do not criminalise private, consensual sexual relations between adults of the same sex.