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Panama News Briefs

Would in some cases legalize domestic violence, allow pedophiles to avoid prosecution with a marriage proposal

Draft Penal Code changes raise objections from women's groups

by Eric Jackson, mainly from other media

Women's groups are protesting some proposed changes in the Penal Code that the National Assembly is currently considering:

• Part of it is that the proposal would roll back changes in recent years to the rape laws. It would, for example, allow an adult charged with having sexual relations with a minor to avoid criminal penalties by promising to marry her. A lot of the distinctions that the current laws make between various kinds of sexual assault would be repealed.

• The proposal would also legalize domestic violence on first offense, by changing the law to require a "pattern of conduct" for wife beating to be a crime.

• Another proposed change that women's groups are protesting is an increase in the penalty for a woman who has an abortion from one to three years in prison to a two to four year sentence.

• The legislators would add a new crime of harming a fetus, which it doesn't define but which could arguably send a woman to prison if she drinks or smokes during pregnancy.

The Alianza de Mujeres, a coalition of women's groups that came together to depose former National Ombudsman Liborio García, who was accused of domestic violence, issued a manifesto that warned that "any legislative reform that affects the human rights of women must not be taken lightly."

However, at the time this story was written the female politicians from both opposition and PRD caucuses and First Lady Vivian Fernández de Torrijos, who threw their weight into the movement to oust García, were maintaining a cautious silence on the proposed changes. The abortion and endangering a fetus proposals in particular hold within them the possibility of a row between the Catholic Church and many Panamanian women.

This proposal comes not from the legislature, but from a Penal Code Reform Commission that was appointed by President Torrijos. It was reviewed by the president's Cabinet Council before being sent on to the National Assembly.

The legislature's Justice Committee may amend the proposed changes to make them less inflamatory, and it appears that women in both the governing and opposition caucuses are quietly working to ensure that it does just that. If the proposed modifications to the domestic violence or sexual assault laws emerge from the committee unchanged, a confrontation featuring many of the protagonists of the Liborio García affair would likely ensue.