PRIME Minister PJ Patterson made clear again this week that his government would not be forced into changing Jamaica’s anti-homosexual laws because of agitation by the gay movement in England.

“We stopped being a British colony,” Patterson told reporters Tuesday, when asked about the campaign by OutRage, the UK gay organisation.

OutRage and the human rights group Amnesty International have cast the recent murder in Kingston of Jamaica’s leading gay rights activist Brian Williamson as a hate crime.

They also claimed that anti-gay killings are common in Jamaica and get little attention from the police, an argument rejected by the Jamaican authorities.

But OutRage, which has led a campaign to ban Jamaican dancehall DJs whose lyrics they consider gay-bashing and homophobic, has also pushed for Jamaica to remove its law against buggery.

But Patterson, in making it clear that Jamaica would not be pressured by such campaigns, said: “The British people can lobby their parliament (for the laws they want). I am beholden to the Jamaican public and parliament.”

Despite the claims by OutRage and Amnesty, the police do not believe that the murder of Williamson, who headed the group JFLAG, was an anti-gay crime.

In fact, the police believe he was killed by persons who he knew well and who he let into his flat. On Tuesday, 24-year-old newspaper vendor Dwight Hayden, who has been charged with Williamson’s murder, was remanded in custody.

The police had been searching for Hayden, who frequented the home, and who a caretaker said was there the evening before Williamson’s body was discovered.

Cops said that Hayden and another man, who has only been identified as “Bombhead”, viciously chopped and stabbed Williamson to death after he failed to meet their demands for money. The men, cops said, stole Williamson’s safe after killing him.