Belize scraps law targeting gay men

A law in Belize that disproportionately affects gay men has been ruled unconstitutional by the country’s Supreme Court after a three-year wait for the judgment.

Section 53 of Belize’s Criminal Code, an old British colonial law, banned ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ and thereby made consensual gay sex between adult men in private illegal in Belize. The legal provision has been ruled ‘unlawful’ to the extent that it can be applied to same-sex activity.

In handing down the judgment, Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin agreed that Section 53 amounts to a violation of the constitutional rights to dignity, privacy, equality and non-discrimination on grounds of sex. He found that there was no justification in the form of ‘public morality’ and therefore the law must be modified. He awarded costs to the Claimaint, Caleb Orozco.

The case is the culmination of years of work by a Caribbean-led coalition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) activists, academics and legal experts. The individual claimant is Caleb Orozco, a Belizean gay man and prominent LGBT human rights advocate.

While convictions under Section 53 in Belize were rare, the law carried a sentence of up ten years’ imprisonment effectively for consensual homosexual sex.

There are still 76 legal jurisdictions across the world that make same-sex intimacy between consenting adults a crime. Of these, 38 countries are, like Belize, members of the Commonwealth.