“Last chance for love” – why the Privy Council must listen conscientiously to those who walk in different shoes 

Jason Jones is a gay man from Trinidad and Tobago who has been fighting for nine years to prove that a 1986 law’s prohibitions on gay sex are unconstitutional. After his 2018 victory in the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago was overturned last year, Jason has taken his case to the highest appellate court. Due to the legacy of British colonialism and independence, that is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which comprises in bulk the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

Our founder, Jolyon Maugham, gave the following speech at a parliamentary reception in support of Jason, “Last Chance for Love”, hosted by Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP.

When my friend Jason Jones walks into the Privy Council, the name we give to the Supreme Court when it adjudicates on matters from our former colonies, and asks it to understand what it is to be a gay Black man living in a country where he cannot love who he wants to love – what will he see? 

He will see a room full of men who are white. And he might see a white woman (two of the twelve Supreme Court judges are women). 

The Supreme Court has not ever had a Black judge. Not even one. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has it ever had a Brown judge. There is an exceptional Brown lawyer in the Court of Appeal and he has been there for nine years but he has not been preferred. White judges in the Supreme Court have been promoted from the Court of Appeal in four years.

And if Mr Jones does some digging into those white men and women he will discover that all of them are married to people of the opposite sex and so he might reasonably assume they are all straight.

I focus on what Mr Jones will learn about the colour of the judge’s skin and their sexuality because those qualities are ones which Mr Jones might reasonably think will influence how they understand what life is like for men like him, men who are gay and whose skin is black in colour.

I say “will influence” how they understand his life because the judges contest that it will.

In a recent lecture, the President of the Supeme Court, Lord Reed said:

“Legal reasoning results in a form of decision-making which the public can accept precisely because judges’ decisions are based on a conscientious attempt to apply the law and not on their personal beliefs and values.”

And he chided a politician for her “assumption that we decide cases on the basis of our personal opinions”.

I don’t need to give you examples of how that is wrong in theory. I want to give you a couple of the many examples of how we can see in practice that judges are influenced by their personal beliefs.

In a recent case brought by my organisation, Good Law Project, a cis male judge decided that the law was that trans people might have to change the toilets they use at work. And he characterised what that would mean in an increasingly transphobic and increasingly violently transphobic world in the following way. He said:

“A propensity for gossip is a feature of every workplace. So far as concerns gossip at work, no employee can expect not to be the subject of gossip about something on some occasion.”

Only a cis person could have said this. No one who understood – or was even seriously interested in – what it is to be outed as trans in Britain today could have said it.

Another example: in the For Women Scotland decision, the Supreme Court, having bluntly refused to be addressed by any trans people, agreed that: 

“lesbians… are no longer using lesbian only spaces because of the presence of trans women (ie biological men who live in the female gender).”

No lesbian judge, acting honestly, could have agreed with this. I make this assertion because there is recent high quality data that shows that 84% of lesbians have either a very positive or positive view of transgender people, and only 6% fairly or very negatively. 

What’s more a court which was not “gender critical” – which was not allowing its personal beliefs and values to have interfered with their role as judges – would have refused even to consider that evidence. It is highly unusual – it may be unprecedented – to accept new, unchallenged, tendentious evidence in a final court of appeal.

I could give many other examples.

I don’t make these points out of anger. 

Let me be clear, I am angry at what the Supreme Court has done to our trans friends and lovers and family and colleagues, and to trust in the rule of law. I am angry because I see the immense pain that decision is caused. But I don’t make these points out of anger. I make them because I care about the rule of law, and I want the Supreme Court to be better and to do better.

Although Lord Reed asserted – again in that same passage in that same lecture – that “Legal reasoning results in a form of decision-making which the public can accept,” that is not born out by the evidence. What the evidence shows is that the public – at least the public that does not look like Supreme Court judges – does not accept legal reasoning. 

We can see that trust in judges is low amongst trans people (in 2025 31%) and declining (in November 2022 it was 46%). And that same 2022 polling tells us that this is not an issue just for trans people. The less you look like a judge, the less you trust the judiciary.

Nevertheless, let me try and finish on a positive note.

What Lord Reed said was that:

“judges’ decisions are based on a conscientious attempt to apply the law and not on their personal beliefs and values.”

That formulation – a “conscientious attempt” – allows in a shard of light. It contemplates the possibility that the personal beliefs of a straight white judge, born of his or her experience, might interfere with how he or she applies the law.

In that admission there is the beginning of humility and in that humility there is the beginning of wisdom. And if you have that wisdom, the solution is easy. Listen carefully, conscientiously, to those who walk in different shoes to yours. 

Listen, when he speaks to you, to Jason Jones. Listen to what he tells you about what life is like if you are a Black gay man living in a country where he cannot love who he wants to love.