Latest news with #SaintLucian
The Hindu
6 hours ago
- Sport
- The Hindu
Olympic 100m champion Alfred to miss Diamond League meets
Olympic 100 metres champion Julien Alfred will miss three upcoming Diamond League meetings in August, event organisers said on Tuesday. The 24-year-old from Saint Lucia will miss the upcoming meets in Silesia, Lausanne and Brussels. She was slated to run the 100m at the Silesia Diamond League and the 200m in Lausanne. However, the athlete denied claims of an injury. According to a report in Saint Lucia Times, she will miss out on the following meets to fine-tune her preparations for the end of the season. She has clocked 10.75 seconds over 100m this season and is ranked second in the world. She last competed at the London Diamond League where she won the 200m in a personal-best 21.71. Alfred has won four races from her five Diamond League appearances in 2025 and secured qualification for the 100m at the final in Zurich, which runs from August 27-28. She made history last summer, becoming the first Saint Lucian to ever win an Olympic medal at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. (With inputs from Reuters)
The Star
01-08-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Caribbean activists celebrate as Saint Lucia strikes down gay sex ban
CASTRIES, Saint Lucia (Reuters) -Caribbean gay rights activists celebrated a landmark court ruling this week striking down colonial-era legislation in the island nation of Saint Lucia that criminalized gay sexual relations and imposed prison terms of up to a decade. The Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court issued the decision on Tuesday in the case brought by LGBTQ rights alliance ECADE on behalf of a gay couple. The court ruled that sections of the criminal code that outlawed "buggery" and "gross indecency" were unconstitutional. "Our own courts are now recognizing that these colonial-era laws are incompatible with human dignity," Dane Lewis, regional program manager at rights group CariFLAGS, said. Many Caribbean countries still have laws forbidding intimacy between people of the same sex, a legacy of British colonial-era statutes. Though rarely enforced, activists say these cement widespread institutional biases and discrimination. Jessica St. Rose, founder of local rights group 758Pride, said the ruling marked a "momentous legal change." "It sends a clear message that love is not a crime," she said, though Saint Lucia still needs reforms to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination and threats to their safety. Saint Lucian politicians were mostly silent about the decision publicly, including Prime Minister Philip Pierre who made a national address ahead of Friday's Emancipation Day. In nearby Guyana, where "buggery" is a felony subject to a lifetime behind bars, rights group Guyana Together welcomed that another country in the CARICOM regional bloc had "dismantled these archaic laws." More than 60 countries worldwide criminalize gay sex, many former British colonies across Africa and the Caribbean. There was some criticism on social media from Saint Lucia residents of the decision, some citing Christian scripture and calling the ruling a sin. "We do expect the religious society to come out to speak out against the recent ruling," St. Rose said. Bradley Desir, a gay man from Saint Lucia who moved to Canada in 2016, said he was encouraged by signs of change and would feel safer visiting the island though he would still maintain his guard. "I hope they carry on with the discussion and possibly call for the legalization of (gay) marriage," he said, adding he did not expect this in his lifetime. The growing visibility of LGBTQ people through global media was a positive sign, he added: "Kids today are growing up in a different world." (Reporting by Sarah Peter in Castries; Editing by Sarah Morland and Cynthia Osterman)
