The U.K. is set to pardon individuals convicted under now-abolished laws criminalizing gay sex, more than 50 years after the country first began to decriminalize homosexual relationships.
An amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will expand the existing scope of past convictions that can be pardoned. Currently, the list includes just nine former offences, according to U.K. newspaper The Guardian. They are “largely focused on the repealed offenses of buggery and gross indecency between men.”
The legislation has passed the House of Commons and is currently awaiting approval from the House of Lords. Were it to become law, people will be able to have any convictions under laws that previously prohibited same-sex activity wiped from their records.
People in England and Wales have been able to apply to have historical convictions for gay sex thrown out since 2012, according to the BBC. The new bill will also include a posthumous pardon for anyone who died before the criteria for what gets expunged was broadened.
U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel thanked Lord Michael Cashman and Lord Lexden for pushing for the changes.
“I hope that expanding the pardons and disregards scheme will go some way to righting the wrongs of the past and to reassuring members of the LGBT community that Britain is one of the safest places in the world to call home,” Patel told The Guardian.
Last November, Cashman called the “disregard and pardon” systems in England and Wales “significantly flawed,” per The Guardian. He also called out the existing bill for covering “only a small fraction of the laws that, over the decades and centuries, have immiserated the lives of gay and bisexual people.”
The Lords, along with Paul Johnson, a professor at the University of Leeds, have reportedly been calling for the changes since 2016.
U.K. LGBTQ2S+ organization Stonewall also praised the trio’s “tireless” efforts in pushing for the legislation. “While the grave harm this has already caused cannot be undone, the Home Secretary’s decisive action is a huge step towards righting the wrongs of the past and will ensure thousands of people will be able to move forward with their lives with a clean slate,” the organization wrote in a Jan. 4 tweet.
British anti-gay laws date back centuries to the colonial era. The Buggery Act of 1533, passed by Parliament during the reign of Henry VIII, is known as the first U.K. law to target male homosexuality, and it came with a death sentence. While it was repealed with the Offences Against the Person Act of 1828, that law merely replaced the death penalty with a sentence of prison labour—one that famed Irish poet Oscar Wilde was notably subjected to.
It took more than four centuries—until 1967—for England and Wales to decriminalize consensual same-sex activity. Even then, however, gay men still faced different legal standards regarding sexual conduct than straight people, such as a higher age of consent.
Anti-sodomy laws have had significant ramifications far beyond the British Isles. Globally, many laws criminalizing homosexuality came directly as a result of British colonial rule, and several countries—including Nigeria and Brunei—still have these laws on the books today. The London-based advocacy organization Human Dignity Trust reports that of the 71 countries with laws criminalizing homosexuality on the books, nearly half are former British territories.
And per the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), at least six countries still list the death penalty as punishment for gay sex.
While the U.K. now enjoys stronger protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the country has proved to be a hostile environment for trans people in the past several years when it comes to health care, cultural discourse and the political arena. Advocates called out the government’s lack of support for trans rights after proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act—which would have eased the requirements for trans people wishing to change their gender marker on official documents—were scrapped in 2020.
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