On November 18, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court (TC) published ruling 1225-25, which formally ended the criminalization of same-sex sexual relations in the country. The ruling, issued in response to a lawsuit filed by lawyers and human rights defenders Patricia Santana and Anderson Dirocie, found Article 210 of Law 285—which creates the National Police Code of Justice—and Article 260 of Law 3483—which creates the Armed Forces Code of Justice—to be unconstitutional. Law 285 established penalties of up to two years in prison and Law 3483 of up to one year to punish same-sex sexual relations.
The police code was enacted in 1966 during the U.S. occupation, while the military code, in force since 1953, is a relic of the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship. The ruling recognized that the contested articles in both laws violate the rights to privacy, private life, free development of personality, and human dignity of members of the National Police and the Armed Forces.
Furthermore, it establishes that “no rule issued by state authorities or individuals may in any way diminish or restrict a person’s rights on the basis of their sexual orientation.”
In recent years, other Latin American countries have decriminalized same-sex relationships. Such was the case in Ecuador in 1997, where the Penal Code established up to eight years prison terms. In Peru in 2004, and Venezuela in 2023, same-sex relationships between military personnel were decriminalized. However, in the Caribbean, laws criminalizing all same-sex relationships persist in Grenada, Guyana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, a legacy of British colonialism. In the Dominican Republic same sex couples cannot marry, there is no legal protection for the identity of trans people, and there are no anti-discrimination laws protecting the LGBTQ+ community.
Patricia Santana highlighted that this is the first ruling issued by the Constitutional Court that refers to the guarantee of rights in relation to Dominicans’ sexual orientation. “These laws created a military jurisdiction with the power to hear disciplinary and criminal offenses. Sodomy was a criminal offense,” explained the lawyer. In 2004, the criminal jurisdiction of military courts was eliminated, but their disciplinary powers were maintained. “Sodomy continued to be punished through disciplinary measures, with dismissal or imprisonment within military premises,” Santana explains.
Repressive Traditions Persist
Santana learned of the case of a female soldier who commented to colleagues in an informal setting that she was attracted to other women. When her comments were relayed to her superiors, she was punished with a three-month confinement to barracks. Fearing that her sexual orientation would be made public and that she would lose her job, she chose not to take legal action against the punishment. In other cases known to Santana and Dirocie, lawsuits were dismissed by the courts or the persecuted individuals chose to resign.
Anderson Dirocie explained that in practice, since same-sex relationships were defined as a crime, “they were interpreted as a violation of morality and good customs, and sexual orientation was effectively punished.” This has led to a situation in which, according to Dirocie, “disciplinary measures are not always subject to due process, nor is there any written record that they are a punishment for same-sex orientation; sometimes language about institutional values and the image of the institution is used.”
This is the first ruling issued by the Constitutional Court that refers to the guarantee of rights in relation to Dominicans’ sexual orientation
Mirla Hernández, a Dominican specialist in gender and social inclusion, believes that the ruling constitutes a significant break with a legal tradition that criminalizes sexual diversity: “It is no longer legal to criminalize people for their sexual orientation. This brings the Dominican state more in line with international human rights standards, albeit belatedly and incompletely.” She emphasized that “historically speaking, this is not an act of generosity on the part of the state, but rather a political victory resulting from decades of LGBTQ+ activism, carried out in contexts of violence, precariousness, and social stigmatization.”
Hernández condemned the institutional practice that combines homophobia with racist criminal profiling, since “black people, impoverished people, residents of working-class neighborhoods, migrants, or Dominicans of Haitian descent, if they are also LGBTQ+, are perceived as suspicious by definition. This translates into arbitrary detentions, illegal searches, forced displacement, public humiliation, and police violence.”
On December 30, Alicia Santos, a Dominican artist, was arrested on charges of co-organizing an event at which a poem entitled “Birds, lesbians, and queers, fly away!” was sung to a melody similar to that of the national anthem—demonstrating that sexual diversity and artistic freedom continue to be criminalized. Two state institutions, the Duartiano Institute, a government organization dedicated to the memory of the country’s founder, and the Permanent Commission on National Holidays, are participating in the legal proceedings against Santos, who is accused of insulting the national anthem.
The Right Challenges the Ruling
The reaction of religious and political sectors aligned with the government to the ruling was immediate. The president of the Dominican Council of Evangelical Unity, Feliciano Lacen, expressed his horror at a “dangerous” attack on “traditional values,” which he believed would lead to “cultural erosion.” The Christian Dialogue and Representation Roundtable declared that the ruling was a blow to the nation’s principles, and the Catholic Church’s coadjutor bishop of Santo Domingo, Tomás Morel, condemned the fact that the ruling was “opening the doors of important institutions (…) to homosexuality.”
During a religious ceremony led by the National Family Commission of the Episcopate on November 23, in which Catholic activists read a manifesto against the ruling, Vice President Raquel Peña distanced herself from the Constitutional Court, arguing that there is a separation of powers and that the government “does not necessarily” agree with the decision.
The following day, during President Luis Abinader’s weekly press conference, both the Minister of Defense and the Director of the National Police stated that they would continue to enforce the codes affected by the ruling. “We respect the independence of the branches of government, but I want to make it very clear that despite this ruling, the Armed Forces maintain their disciplinary code, which applies without distinction to all military personnel who violate it,” said Defense Minister Carlos Fernández. The director of the National Police expressed himself in a similar vein, adding that “we have internal rules and regulations and we have oversight bodies that ensure that those rules and regulations are complied with.”
Both the Minister of Defense and the Director of the National Police stated that they would continue to enforce the codes affected by the ruling.
Anderson Dirocie considers these statements to be ambiguous and that “the duty of the police and the armed forces is to adapt any rule to the obligation not to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.” In an article, lawyer Cristóbal Rodríguez argues that the minister and the police chief “suggest the option of contempt.” Meanwhile, former minister Pelegrín Castillo, from the far-right organization National Progressive Force (Fuerza Nacional Progresista, FNP), allied with the government, congratulated the officials for “resisting that ruling by the Constitutional Court.”
This would not be the first time that the government has defied a Constitutional Court ruling. In 2023, the president of the Constitutional Court listed 92 rulings that had not been complied with by the executive branch. The Constitutional Court itself, however, has contributed to this tradition of law-breaking. Twelve years ago, when it issued ruling 168-13, which denationalized several generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent and affected more than 200,000 people born after 1929, broad sectors of Dominican society criticized the Court for acting outside the constitution. When the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled that ruling 168-13 violated the American Convention on Human Rights, the Court responded by declaring the Dominican State’s acceptance of the IACHR’s jurisdiction in 1999 unconstitutional. That decision was adopted in the context of the Dominican Republic’s failure to comply with several IACHR rulings related to human rights violations in the country.
The concerns surrounding the police and armed forces go far beyond their institutionalized homophobia. Although there is no death penalty in the country, between January and September 5, 2025, the National Police killed 170 people. All repressive forces in the Dominican Republic participate in a policy of mass deportations against the Haitian migrant community, which has been described, due to its systematic illegality, as a de facto state of emergency.
“Real” Men and Women
Carmen De la Rosa and Lidia Pérez, members of Congress of the Modern Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Moderno, PRM), also spoke out against the ruling. In a speech to the Chamber of Deputies, Pérez said that conservative people were called upon to “put a stop” to the implementation of the ruling: “If we are a conservative country with moral and spiritual principles, why do they insist on this woke globalist agenda? (…) Today more than ever we need real men, not sissies (…) God, fatherland, and freedom!”
Queer Dominicans formed a key part of the fight for a more just and dignified homeland as part of the April Revolution of 1965.
Decades before the right wing associated homophobic hatred with a purported defense of the nation against a woke globalist agenda, queer men and women formed a key part of the fight for a more just and dignified homeland as part of the April Revolution of 1965. At the time, popular movements fought to overthrow the coup regime that had usurped power two years earlier and restore the Constitution promulgated during the government of Juan Bosch. Argentina Macario, who was an active participant at the time, highlighted in a forum in New York in 2007 that among the women who fought in the revolution, “the most forgotten are those from marginalized neighborhoods, from the popular masses, such as prostitutes, lesbians, and even older women, (who) fought alongside everyone else in the commandos and supplied food, water, and transporting weapons from one place to another.”
Other scholars agree with Macario’s analysis. Writer Amaury Rodríguez believes that “the revolution turned society and the traditional order upside down,” and highlights the heroic participation of gay combatants such as the reciter Frank Adolfo and the singer and dancer Tony Echavarría, known as Cambumbo, both now deceased. The 2005 book Historia gráfica de la Guerra de Abril contains a testimony about the “Homosexual Command” that fought the U.S. invaders near Mella Avenue in Santo Domingo.The current situation could not be further from that revolutionary past. President Luis Abinader declares himself a follower of the ideas of Joaquín Balaguer, the president imposed by the United States in 1966, and is a key part of the region’s ascendant far-right movement. In this context, the Constitutional Court’s ruling is not insignificant, though the victory has been met with skepticism in the LGBTQ+ community. For Mirla Hernández, “the progress is celebrated, but there is suspicion about the gap between the written law and reality. Without structural changes, this decision runs the risk of becoming a symbolic rather than a material victory.”
Simón Rodríguez is a journalist and researcher based in the Dominican Republic.