Jamaica’s rainbow tug-of-war: Sovereignty vs. Reform

Jamaica remains one of only five countries across the Americas (all Caricom members) still criminalising same-sex relationships between consenting adults, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) 2025 annual report — a finding that puts fresh pressure on the Caricom nation to act on rulings it has so far ignored.

The IACHR, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States (OAS), identified Jamaica as among a shrinking minority of states in the Western Hemisphere maintaining laws that penalise consensual same-sex intimacy. 

Under Sections 76, 77 and 79 of Jamaica's Offences Against the Person Act 1864 — legislation introduced by British colonial authorities in the 19th century — consensual sexual activity between adult males remains a criminal offence. Conviction for 'buggery' carries a sentence of up to ten years imprisonment with hard labour.

This is not the IACHR's first rebuke of Kingston on the issue. In a landmark December 2020 ruling on the case of Gareth Henry and Simone Edwards — two Jamaican LGBTQI+ advocates who fled the island after facing violent attacks and were granted asylum in Canada and the Netherlands respectively — the commission found Jamaica in direct violation of its obligations under the American Convention on Human Rights and urged the immediate repeal of the offending laws.

Jamaica has yet to implement those recommendations. The 2025 report confirms the country remains in breach of its international legal obligations, with no legislative reform initiated.

• Jamaica is one of only five OAS member states still criminalising same-sex relationships between consenting adults • The IACHR flagged Jamaica's status in its 2025 annual report • Jamaica's anti-homosexuality laws date to the British colonial-era Offences Against the Person Act 1864 • Conviction for 'buggery' under Jamaican law carries up to ten years imprisonment with hard labour • The IACHR ruled in December 2020 that Jamaica's laws violate the American Convention on Human Rights • The ruling stemmed from a case filed by Gareth Henry and Simone Edwards, both of whom fled Jamaica and were granted asylum abroad • Jamaica has not implemented the IACHR's recommendations and remains in breach of international law

The IACHR's findings carry real human weight. Jamaican LGBTQI+ advocates Gareth Henry and Simone Edwards — whose landmark 2011 case triggered the Commission's historic ruling — were both forced to flee Jamaica and seek asylum abroad after facing violence, discrimination and a state that repeatedly failed to protect them. Henry was beaten by four police officers in 2007; Edwards was shot twice outside her home in 2008, losing a kidney and part of her liver. Their attackers were never prosecuted.

The IACHR's 2020 ruling — the first in which the body declared that laws criminalising LGBTQI+ people violate international law — ordered Jamaica to repeal Sections 76, 77 and 79 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1864, which carry penalties of up to ten years' imprisonment. Jamaica has yet to act, leaving the country in continued breach of its obligations under the American Convention on Human Rights.

Predictions: • Jamaica is unlikely to repeal anti-sodomy provisions ahead of the 2025-2026 electoral cycle given historically conservative voter sentiment on the issue • Civil society groups across the Commonwealth Caribbean may use the IACHR's 2025 report to reinvigorate regional decriminalisation advocacy campaigns • Continued non-compliance could prompt IACHR to escalate the Henry and Edwards case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

The case for reform: The legal argument is straightforward: Jamaica's anti-homosexuality laws were not written by Jamaicans. Sections 76, 77 and 79 of the Offences Against the Person Act were imposed by British colonial authorities in 1864 — the same imperial framework Jamaica spent decades fighting to escape. The IACHR ruled in 2020 that these statutes violate the American Convention on Human Rights, a treaty Kingston voluntarily signed. Gareth Henry was beaten by four police officers in 2007. Simone Edwards was shot twice outside her home in 2008, losing a kidney and part of her liver. Neither case was prosecuted. That is not cultural conservatism — that is state failure. Five years after the IACHR ruling, and with Jamaica now flagged in the body's 2025 annual report, continued inaction carries an increasingly explicit cost to the country's international standing.

The case for caution: Jamaican voices on this issue are not monolithic, but they are overwhelmingly consistent: polling repeatedly shows deep public opposition to decriminalisation, rooted in religious conviction and a fierce postcolonial sense of self-determination. For many Jamaicans, external pressure from Washington or Geneva reads less as moral clarity and more as a familiar script — outsiders dictating terms to a small island nation. The cultural conversation must happen, advocates concede, but it must be led from within.