Law Association: Respect gay rights

GIVEN Thursday’s tensions outside the Hall of Justice by those opposed to the judgment won by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex (LGBTQI) community, the Law Association of TT (LATT) is urging the public to be respectful of the ruling.

While people are free to comment and criticise, LATT in a release yesterday said, “we urge all concerned to exercise their undoubted right to free expression, especially in relation to the learned judge’s decision, in a lawful and respectful manner”.

LATT expressed its agreement with Justice Devindra Rampersad’s ruling in the case of Jason Jones on behalf of the LGBTQI, saying that laws which criminalise sexual relations between consenting adults, are not sanctioned by modern constitutions in liberal democratic societies. Such laws violate the individual’s rights to privacy and to equality before the law.

Since the ruling, there have been harsh, many offensive online posts, criticising the LGBTQI community. LATT referred to a recent judgment of the High Court of Belize which struck down a colonial law that made sodomy a criminal offence. “The decision of justice Devindra Rampersad striking down the Trinidad and Tobago equivalent is accordingly well in harmony with modern constitutional jurisprudence. What is unique about the Jason Jones case is the fact that the court was confronted, not simply with a hold-over colonial law, but, as the learned judge found, with the deliberate legislative act of three fifths of the members of the post-colonial House of Representatives and Senate, knowingly to set about to infringe the constitutional rights of an identifiable sector of Trinidad and Tobago society and to continue to outlaw their lifestyle,” LATT said. The association said Rampersad’s decision will carve out an equal and private space into which the state ought not to intrude, and to recognise the right of every individual to determine for him or herself the person he or she chooses to be with. Implicit in the judge’s decision is the declaration that whatever adults do in their private lives is their own business.

Urging people to be tolerant, LATT said in its support of the judgment, that those who comprise the legislature, should not use the criminal law to impose their own religious or moral beliefs “on the rest of us”. In recognising however that the judgment would be appealed, LATT said that it is not in dispute that the criminalisation of same-sex consensual sexual relations infringes important constitutional right s.

“The legal issues to be determined on appeal are whether a law which admittedly violates constitutional rights, is nevertheless saved from being struck down by a constitutional provision which protects old colonial laws and whether the legislature by a special three-fifths majority can override what they know to be a constitutional violation.”