The Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform was an organisation set up to campaign for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Its most prominent leader was David Norris, an English studies lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, Joycean scholar and from the 1980s to the present a member of Seanad Éireann.
The Supreme Court of Ireland is the highest judicial authority in Ireland. It is a court of final appeal and exercises, in conjunction with the Court of Appeal and the High Court, judicial review over Acts of the Oireachtas. The Supreme Court also has appellate jurisdiction to ensure compliance with the Constitution of Ireland by governmental bodies and private citizens. It sits in the Four Courts in Dublin.
Dudgeon v the United Kingdom (1981) was a European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case, which held that Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 which criminalised male homosexual acts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland violated the European Convention on Human Rights.
Section 377 of the British colonial penal code criminalized all sexual acts "against the order of nature". The law was used to prosecute people engaging in oral and anal sex along with homosexual activity. As per Supreme Court Judgement since 2018, Indian Penal Code Section 377 is used to convict non-consensual sexual activities among homosexuals with a minimum of ten years imprisonment extended to life imprisonment. It has been used to criminalize third gender people, such as the apwint in Myanmar. In 2018, then British Prime Minister Theresa May acknowledged how the legacies of British colonial anti-sodomy laws continue to persist today in the form of discrimination, violence, and death.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the Republic of Ireland improved greatly in recent decades, and are now among the most advanced in Europe. Ireland is notable for its transformation from a country holding overwhelmingly conservative attitudes toward LGBT issues, in part due to the opposition by the Roman Catholic Church, to one holding overwhelmingly liberal views in the space of a generation. In May 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalise same-sex marriage on a national level by popular vote. The New York Times declared that the result put Ireland at the "vanguard of social change". Since July 2015, transgender people in Ireland can self-declare their gender for the purpose of updating passports, driving licences, obtaining new birth certificates, and getting married. Both male and female expressions of homosexuality were decriminalised in 1993, and most forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation are now outlawed. Ireland also forbids incitement to hatred based on sexual orientation.
X. v. the United Kingdom was a 1978 case before the European Court of Human Rights, challenging the Sexual Offences Act 1956 in the United Kingdom. The case addressed privacy protections and age of consent laws for homosexuals.
Norris v. Ireland was a case decided by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 1988, in which David Norris successfully charged that Ireland's criminalisation of certain homosexual acts between consenting adult men was in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 is an act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. It legalised homosexual acts in England and Wales, on the condition that they were consensual, in private and between two men who had attained the age of 21. The law was extended to Scotland by the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980 and to Northern Ireland by the Homosexual Offences Order 1982.
The ages of consent vary by jurisdiction across Europe. The ages of consent – hereby meaning the age from which one is deemed able to consent to having sex with anyone else of consenting age or above – are between 14 and 18. The vast majority of countries set their ages in the range of 14 to 16; only four countries, Cyprus (17), the Republic of Ireland (17), Turkey (18), and the Vatican City (18), set an age of consent higher than 16.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Botswana face legal issues not experienced by non-LGBT citizens. Both female and male same-sex sexual acts have been legal in Botswana since 11 June 2019 after a unanimous ruling by the High Court of Botswana. Despite an appeal by the government, the ruling was upheld by the Botswana Court of Appeal on 29 November 2021.
Prostitution in South Africa is illegal for both buying and selling sex, as well as related activities such as brothel keeping and pimping. However, it remains widespread. Law enforcement is poor.
National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and Another v Minister of Justice and Others is a decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa which struck down the laws prohibiting consensual sexual activities between men. Basing its decision on the Bill of Rights in the Constitution – and in particular its explicit prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation – the court unanimously ruled that the crime of sodomy, as well as various other related provisions of the criminal law, were unconstitutional and therefore invalid.
Toonen v. Australia was a landmark human rights complaint brought before the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) by Tasmanian resident Nicholas Toonen in 1994. The case resulted in the repeal of Australia's last sodomy laws when the Committee held that sexual orientation was included in the antidiscrimination provisions as a protected status under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
A sodomy law is a law that defines certain sexual acts as crimes. The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in the law but are typically understood by courts to include any sexual act deemed to be "unnatural" or "immoral". Sodomy typically includes anal sex, oral sex, manual sex, and bestiality. In practice, sodomy laws have rarely been enforced against heterosexual couples, and have mostly been used to target homosexual couples.
Naz Foundation v. Govt. of NCT of Delhi (2009) is a landmark Indian case decided by a two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court, which held that treating consensual homosexual sex between adults as a crime is a violation of fundamental rights protected by India's Constitution. The verdict resulted in the decriminalization of homosexual acts involving consenting adults throughout India. This was later overturned by the Supreme Court of India in Suresh Kumar Koushal vs. Naz Foundation, in which a 2 judge bench reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. However, even that was overturned by a 5 judge bench in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India in 2018, decriminalizing homosexuality once again.
Section 20A of the Immorality Act, 1957, commonly known as the "men at a party" clause, was a South African law that criminalised all sexual acts between men that occurred in the presence of a third person. The section was enacted by the Immorality Amendment Act, 1969 and remained in force until it was found to be unconstitutional in 1998 by the Constitutional Court in the case of National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality v Minister of Justice.
Navtej Singh Johar &Ors. v. Union of India thr. Secretary Ministry of Law and Justice (2018) is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of India that decriminalised all consensual sex among adults, including homosexual sex.
The legal career of Mary Robinson, which occurred prior to her becoming President of Ireland in 1990, lasted over 22 years. Made a barrister in 1967, Robinson specialised in constitutional, criminal, and European community law.
Orozco v Attorney General (2016) 90 WIR 161, also known as Orozco v AG, the Orozco case, or the UNIBAM case, was a landmark case heard by the Supreme Court of Belize, which held that a long-standing buggery statute breached constitutional rights to dignity, equality before the law, freedom of expression, privacy, and non-discrimination on grounds of sex, and which declared the statute null and void to the applicable extent. The decision decriminalised consensual same-sex intercourse for the first time in 127 years, and established that the constitutional right to non-discrimination on grounds of sex extended to sexual orientation.
