Jeff Dudgeon

The 1967 act did not reach Northern Ireland, and in 1976 police raided Dudgeon's Belfast home, seized his diaries and questioned him about his sex life. He took the case to Strasbourg, and in Dudgeon v United Kingdom in 1981 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that criminalising private sex between consenting men violated the right to private life, the first such ruling by an international court. Parliament decriminalised in Northern Ireland the following year, and the judgment became the precedent for later cases in Ireland and Cyprus. Dudgeon later served as an Ulster Unionist councillor in Belfast.