Exactly one year since the UK’s highest court, the Privy Council, heard arguments on 23 Feb. 2021 for and against same-sex marriage in the Cayman Islands, a judgment has still not been returned.
“It is really disappointing from a human rights and human dignity standpoint that we are now over a year with no decision from the Privy Council on the matter of equality for LGBTQ people in the UK’s overseas territories,” said attorney and same-sex advocate Leonardo Raznovich, who is also a staunch supporter of Chantelle Day and Vickie Bodden Bush, the couple who initiated the legal challenge.
Raznovich told the Cayman Compass, via WhatsApp, the Privy Council’s delay has become “unreasonable” according to its own standards.
“Even in the Privy Council’s own view, this constitutes unreasonable ‘excessive delay’ – as they held in a case which did not even deal with human rights,” Raznovich said.
Now in its third and final stage, the civil dispute seeks to answer two questions. The first is whether Cayman’s Bill of Rights, as set out in the Constitution, provides for a right for same-sex couples to be married. If so, the second question asks whether the Grand Court’s 2019 ruling, which changed the wording of the Marriage Law to legalise same-sex marriage, should be restored.
The Grand Court ruled in favour of Day and Bodden Bush and changed the wording of the Marriage Law to allow same-sex couples to be married. However, this was overturned by the Court of Appeal.
Raznovich said he hopes the delay signals a favourable decision for the LGBTQ community in Cayman.
He told the Compass, “One can only hope that such a delay is because Chantelle and Vickie’s case will mark a turning point in the history of the Privy Council for the Caribbean finally embracing human dignity, as Chief Justice (Anthony) Smellie said in justifying his decision in March 2019, so that we can all live in every corner of the UK in a more equal and more decent society.”
The Cayman Islands government has opposed the implementation of same-sex marriage legislation and while defending the Court of Appeal’s decision argued that Cayman’s Constitution provided limited “free-standing rights to equality” on issues such as same-sex marriage.
Background to the case
Caymanian Day and her partner, Bodden Bush, were denied a marriage licence in 2018 after their application was rejected on the basis that the Marriage Law defines marriage as “the union between a man and a woman as husband and wife”.
In March 2019, the Grand Court found in their favour, ruling that preventing same-sex marriage was incompatible with Cayman’s Bill of Rights, as set out in the Constitution, which guarantees the right to private and family life.
Smellie used his powers under the Constitution to rewrite the Marriage Law, legalising same-sex marriage by defining marriage as the “union between two people as one another’s spouses”.
In November 2019, the Cayman Islands Court of Appeal overturned that decision, ruling that the right to marry under the Constitution does not cover same-sex couples. However, the court also ordered the government to act “expeditiously” to provide the couple with a legal status equivalent to marriage.
The couple subsequently appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
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