Law Regarding Same-sex Sexual Activity
Before 2000, anal sex was a criminal offence referred to as the crime of buggery under the British Virgin Islands Criminal Code. However, sexual acts between two consenting adult males in private were expressly decriminalized by an Order in Council in the British Virgin Islands (and other British Caribbean territories) by the British Government pursuant to the Caribbean Territories (Criminal Law) Order, 2000 Sections 3(1) and 3(7). According to section 4 of the order, the law was passed retrospectively. There are two exceptions to the law: group sex, or sex in public, remains a criminal offence and may also lead to a charge under gross indecency and other minor sexual offence laws.
As a British overseas territory, the British Virgin Islands Government is required to comply with their obligations under the international human rights instruments which have been extended to them. Specifically this includes an adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights which highlight a responsibility to ensure non-discrimination.
Read more about this topic: LGBT Rights In The British Virgin Islands
Famous quotes containing the words law and/or activity:
“All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)