Court strikes down St. Kitts and Nevis buggery law
The Eastern Caribbean High Court struck down laws criminalizing same-sex intercourse in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis on Monday, August 29. The ruling takes immediate effect and includes costs awarded to the claimants.
A claim was brought against the government of St. Kitts and Nevis in January 2021 by Jamal Jeffers, a citizen of the federation, and the St. Kitts and Nevis Alliance for Equality, with the support of the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality.
The claimants argued that sections 56 and 57 of the Offences Against the Person Act, which criminalized “buggery” and “attempted sodomy,” violated provisions of the St. Kitts and Nevis Constitution which guarantee the right to liberty, freedom of expression, privacy, and freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex.
The court ruled that the law violated the right to privacy and freedom of expression, but did not agree that it violated the right to liberty or that the law discriminated on the basis of sex. Consequently, the court ruled that the the impugned laws must be read as if they exclude consensual acts between adults in private.
In recent rulings striking down sodomy laws in Belize and Antigua and Barbuda, the courts found that those countries’ constitutional bans on discrimination based on the ground of “sex” included a ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity. In this ruling, the court disagreed, in part because St. Kitts and Nevis has not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, like the other states have.
This decision is the second time this year that the Eastern Caribbean High Court has struck down sodomy laws, after a decision negating sodomy laws in Antigua and Barbuda in July.
There are now seven states in the Caribbean region with active sodomy laws on the books, all former British colonies: Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The decision brings the total number of criminalizing states in the world to 69.
The name of the top Eastern Caribbean court was corrected on Aug. 30. It is the Eastern Caribbean High Court, not the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.
