Less talk more action, says PNCR

Dec 14, 2008 News

…it is completed and currently with AG chambers for review –

Manickchand

Responding to criticism in the National Assembly that she was just providing the nation with lip service on the Sexual Offences Bill, Minister of Human Services and Social Security Priya Manickchand clarified with the House that it was completed, handed over to the Attorney General and was currently with the Chief Parliamentary Counsel Cecil Dhurjon.

Shadow Minister of Home Affairs Deborah Backer during a recent debate on violence against women told the house that the Minister had taken over a year to complete the new piece of legislation and was just talking about it with no real action being taken.

However Manickchand rebuked the claim, telling the house that the legislation did not take a year to put together, rather, the time was spent consulting the populace to seek to include suggestions by the nation.
She told the house that in addition to the Sexual Offences Bill, the Children’s Bill was also with the Dhurjon.

According to Manickchand, the Sexual Offences Bill seeks to update the archaic laws currently in existence and during the debate in the House urged the Members of Parliament to support the piece of legislation.

According to Manickchand, the Bill stems directly from and includes contributions made during the recently concluded ‘Stamp it Out’ consultations and, “all of the proposed clauses in the Bill were stridently called for by the people of Guyana during the consultation period.” One aspect of the new legislation seeks to redefine rape and make it punishable by life imprisonment.

Manickchand recently pointed out to this newspaper that as it is right now, the offence of rape is restricted to penetration of the vagina by the penis, hence some of the worst sexual violence against men, women and children involving other types of penetration can only be prosecuted as indecent assault, which carries a lesser penalty.

“If a person were to insert a bottle or broomstick or other implement into the anus or vagina of a man or woman it would not be considered rape, but sexual assault which would mean that the penalty would not be as punitive as it should be,” Manickchand noted.

She added that in line with reforms around the world and to maximise protection, there will be a clause in the piece of legislation that widens the definition of rape to cater for “offensive activities we know are happening”.

The new definition of rape will, if approved in the National Assembly, “include any intrusion, however slight, of any part of a person’s body or of any object into the vagina or anus of another person, and any contact, however slight, between the mouth of one person and the genitals or anus of another, including but not limited to sexual intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio, anal intercourse and female to female genital contact….
“The definition is gender-neutral, meaning that rape of both male and female victims, by a male or female offender, is covered.”

Another section of the proposed legislation could see husbands being charged for raping their wives.
For hundreds of years the courts that inherit the Roman Dutch Law could not convict a man for raping his legally married wife, given that it was embedded in English law for over 150 years (that Guyana adopted) that a wife was “mere chattel”, the property of the husband, and that consent to sex at any time was taken to flow from the fact that they were married.

No Guyanese court has ruled on this point since Independence, so this is still the law in Guyana. That exemption has since been completely abolished in more than 50 countries, including England, India, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela and Canada, and it is soon to be abolished in South Africa.

When the House of Lords abolished the exemption in England, in the case of RvR, Lord Keith had said, “Marriage is in modern times regarded as a partnership of equals, and no longer one in which the wife must be the subservient chattel of the husband.”

He added that the previous law (that is still in use here in Guyana) says that by marriage a wife gives her irrevocable consent to sexual intercourse with her husband under all circumstances and irrespective of her state of health or how she happens to be feeling at the time.

“In modern times any reasonable person must regard that conception as quite unacceptable…On grounds of principle there is now no justification for the marital exemption of rape,” said Keith.

In an invited comment Manickchand told this newspaper that she was optimistic that Dhurjon would complete the review in time to have the Bill tabled before the end of the year.