Homosexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 1982

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The Homosexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 1982, No. 1536 (N.I. 19), is an Order in Council which decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in Northern Ireland. The Order was adopted as a result of a European Court of Human Rights case, Dudgeon v. United Kingdom (1981), which ruled that Northern Ireland's criminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults was a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights

The homosexual age of consent fixed by the Order (18) was higher than the heterosexual age of consent in the rest of Northern Ireland, which had been set at 17 for decades. The ages of consent for homosexual and heterosexual acts in Northern Ireland were eventually equalised at 17 with the passage of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000. In order to bring Northern Ireland in line with the rest of the United Kingdom, the draft Sexual Offences NI Order will lower the age of consent to 16 starting.^[1]