UK Court Blocks Gay Marriage for the Cayman Islands and Bermuda
LGBTQ+ activists supporting same-sex marriage in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda received a major setback this week after a ruling by a top appeals court in London.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the United Kingdom’s Privy Council, which serves as the final court of appeals for several islands in the Caribbean, sided with the government of Bermuda, which had fought a local Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage.
The Privy Council also ruled that gay people don’t have the right to marry in the Cayman Islands because of the Caribbean island’s Constitution.
“I’m in shock,” said local activist Leonardo Raznovich. He told the Associated Press, “The decision is an affront to human dignity.” Raznovich said he plans to fight the Privy Council’s decision.
One of the five judges in the Bermuda case dissented. In its judgment, the Privy Council acknowledged that the historical background of marriage is “one of the stigmatization, denigration, and victimization of gay people and that the restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples may create among gay people a sense of exclusion and stigma.”
However, it said that “international instruments and other countries’ constitutions cannot be used to read into [Bermuda’s Constitution] a right to the legal recognition of same-sex marriage.”
Meanwhile, the ruling was unanimous in the Cayman Islands case, with judges writing that “the effect of the board’s interpretation is that this is a matter of choice for the legislative assembly rather than a right laid down in the constitution.”
The Cayman Islands case reached the Privy Council after two women — Chantelle Day and Vickie Bodden Bush — were denied a marriage license in 2018. The couple, who recently adopted a daughter, went to court, and in March 2019, the Cayman Grand Court ruled in their favor after stating that the denial violated the law.
Months later, a local appeals court overturned the decision, stating that the Cayman Constitution doesn’t allow for same-sex marriage. However, it ordered the government to provide the women with a legal status equivalent to marriage.
In May 2017, the island’s Supreme Court ruled that they were legal, but the party that won the general elections months later rejected that ruling and allowed only domestic partnerships.
Caribbean activists had hoped for a favorable ruling to help sway public opinion in a largely conservative region where colonial anti-sodomy laws remain on the books and same-sex marriage is rarely considered a right.
“It’s taken us some time to get here. … We’ve had to jump over a few hurdles. It would definitely act as a beacon of hope for the entire region,” said Billie Bryan, founder and president of Colours Cayman, a nonprofit advocacy group for the LGBTQ community. “The Privy Council has done nothing more, by its decision, than reassert the oppressive political environment of yesteryear.”
Source: Los Angeles Times
