A court in London has upheld a Cayman Islands law legalising same-sex civil partnerships, in a move that campaigners say could turn the tide for other British overseas territories battling for LGBTQ+ rights.
On Monday, the privy council, the final court of appeal for the British overseas territory, rejected an appeal that had argued the Caribbean island’s governor had no right to enact the bill, after lawmakers had rejected similar legislation.
Leonardo Raznovich, acting president for the LGBTQ+ human rights organisation, Colours Caribbean, described the outcome of the long-running legal battle a “victory for all”.
The change in the law came in 2020 following a landmark court case brought by a lesbian couple – Caymanian lawyer Chantelle Day and her partner Vickie Bodden Bush, a nurse – after they were refused permission to marry.
Day said the decision was a “big relief”.
“It’s an absolute relief that us and other couples in the Caymans now have the certainty that the legal framework that we all relied on for recognition of our relationships won’t be pulled from underneath us and that the constitution works the way it’s intended to,” she said.
When the couple made their original case, the Cayman Islands’ courts ultimately ruled that the right to marry extended only to opposite-sex couples, but that same-sex couples were entitled to legal protection “which is functionally equivalent to marriage”.
A bill was brought to parliament to put that protection into law, but lawmakers rejected it in July 2020 by nine votes to eight.
Two months later, the then governor, Martyn Roper, enacted the Civil Partnership Law, allowing same-sex civil partnerships, saying the action had to be taken to uphold human rights.
Kattina Anglin, a lawyer based in the Cayman Islands, argued that Roper did not have the power to introduce the law under the Cayman Islands’ constitution. But her case was rejected by the islands’ courts and her final appeal was dismissed by the privy council.
Raznovich said the decision could have implications for ongoing litigation in other British overseas territories, such as Turks and Caicos, and the British Virgin Islands.
But he was less confident about the impact on cases involving independent Caribbean countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, which still have colonial era laws that criminalise consensual anal sex and where same-sex marriages and civil partnerships are prohibited.
In 2018, a high court judgment repealed Trinidad and Tobago’s so-called “buggery law”, but in April the country’s supreme court upheld a government appeal against the ruling and recriminalised the act, forcing campaigners to take their case to the privy council.
Controversial “savings clauses”, which typically were created when countries gained their independence, and were designed to preserve colonial laws unless they are changed by parliament, complicates the situation in Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean countries.
Anglin told the Guardian she would provide a response to the decision on Thursday when she has had the time to fully review the judgment and meet with her legal team.
Reuters contributed reporting
