Caribbean Court of Justice Strikes Down Guyana Cross-Dressing Law

" The cross-dressing proscription, along with many other provisions in the Act, such as declaring a man be a vagabond and subject to a fine because he does not work and support himself or his wife when capable of so doing, is a law that belonged to a different time. It criminalized the expression of sexual orientation and gender identification at a time when State intrusion of that nature was the norm and human rights were, at best, a developing intellectual concept. This was not the age of liberal democracy; sovereignty did not belong to the people, as Article 1 of the 1980 Guyana Constitution was later to proclaim. Laws of the nature of section 153(1)(xlvii) were directed to keeping the masses in their place. It seemed contrarian, therefore, that the State, whose Constitution proclaims it to be in transition from capitalism to socialism and champions fundamental rights proclaimed long ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, should have argued for the presumption of constitutionality to benefit a law such as section 153(1)(xlvii) ... 

For the reasons detailed in the judgment of the Court, delivered by the President, the highly undemocratic section 153(1)(xlvii) is inconsistent with the several Articles of the Constitution stated and must be declared void for that inconsistency ... "

Caribbean Court of Justice, November 13, 2018. 

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