I am a gay Trinidadian. Until three days ago, making that statement could have landed me in prison. Before Thursday, it was a crime for adults of the same gender to have sex. Our “buggery” law imposed 25 years’ imprisonment. All other intimacy between two women or two men risked five years’ imprisonment under the demeaningly named offence of “serious indecency”.

Last year I said enough is enough and sued my country to change the law. My legal team, led by Richard Drabble QC, argued that these laws violate the right to privacy, family life, equality before the law and freedom of expression.

On Thursday we won the case – and resoundingly so. Mr Justice Rampersad in the high court of Port of Spain, our capital, handed down judgment agreeing that each of these rights was violated. On a rough count, there are about 100,000 LGBTQ+ people in Trinidad and Tobago. Finally, each of us is free from the fear of arrest, prosecution and imprisonment simply for living our lives.

Listening to the judgment, I broke down in tears as I realised that I had won, that my country – for the first time – had accepted me for who I am. I can’t describe how it feels to hear a judge say that as a gay man I have an inherent human dignity with which the state must not interfere. His firmness on this point was commendable – laws that criminalise homosexuality, he ruled, are as heinous as those that allowed apartheid, segregation and the Holocaust. I agree.

The judge recognised that when human dignity is stripped away, so as to render one characteristic “superior” to another, society goes awry. After the judgment, as I stood outside the Hall of Justice wrapped in a rainbow flag, I had finally been clothed in dignity.

This judgment was the culmination of my 30 years of human rights’ activism. I was born in the 1960s, the decade that Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from Britain. Like other former colonies, we inherited Britain’s anti-gay laws. But our Spanish, French and Dutch-speaking neighbours do not criminalise homosexuality, and never did. Read more via the Guardian