No applications made for official homosexual offences pardon

Email to apply 'still active and continues to be monitored'

No applications have been made for an official pardon by anyone convicted of homosexual offences on the Isle of Man.

But the Department of Home Affairs has confirmed to Manx Radio the email address to formally apply (disregard@gov.im), is 'still active and continues to be monitored'.

This month marks three years since legislation came into force which allows people who were cautioned or convicted before homosexuality was decriminalised 30 years ago to receive a pardon.

A clause within the Sexual Offences and Obscene Publications Bill 2021 was 'switched on' on 29 June 2022.

While those pardons were applied automatically, more information is needed for the police to physically remove details from an individual's file.

People have to apply to the Department of Home Affairs to have convictions removed from their criminal records.

It's a process which was said to be expected to take around 12 weeks to complete; but no one has approached the Department to do so.

When the change was made, it was thought that the move would apply to around 30 people.

It came after prolonged campaigns from gay rights activists like Alan Shea, whose protest on Tynwald Hill in 1991 was seen as the catalyst for laws being changed the following year.

In 2022, then-Chief Constable Gary Roberts penned a five-page letter to the Isle of Pride charity apologising for the ways in which laws criminalising homosexuality were sometimes enforced.

He described it as being, in many ways, the ‘most difficult letter’ he'd had to write in ‘a lifetime of public service’.

Homosexuality was a criminal offence on the Island until 1992, despite it being decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967.