Law of ‘only yes is yes’
The Socialists’ 13-page bill maintains the definition of consent in Article 178 of the Penal Code, but rescues the previous forks and introduces violence and intimidation in Article 179.
Once the lack of consensus between the partners of the Government has been verified, the PSOE has fulfilled its threat to present its proposed law alone to reform the law of ‘only yes is yes’ just four months after its entry into force, on 7 October. The Socialists have registered in Congress, with only their signature, a 13-page bill with which they crystallize their plan to reform a rule that has triggered alarm by lightening, in an undesirable effect not intended by the legislator, the you sentence 400 sex offenders, with more than thirty early releases. The text, the result of the work of technicians from the Ministry of Justice led by Pilar Llop, maintains the literalness of consent, the workhorse that has led to the schism with Igualdad and Unidas Podemos over the star regulation of Irene Montero. But it rescues the previous, higher criminal forks, and expressly reintroduces violence and intimidation as circumstances that aggravate the violation.
This black on white is what leads Montero and his team to argue that the socialist reform, although it formally preserves consent, reverses it in practice by once again making explicit the conditions for violent and intimidating behavior. Which reverses the scheme that the purples summarize with which the victim is no longer subjected to a “probationary ordeal” because she no longer has to justify that she resisted, but if she consented. The PSOE disagrees that this is in danger with its reform. Both partners approved in 2021 the Law for the Comprehensive Guarantee of Sexual Freedom, amending the Penal Code, after a negotiation with edges in which the then vice president Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero managed to get Sánchez to put the content and speed of the regulation first. Equality to the legal reserves of the then number two in the Government, Carmen Calvo, and the Minister of Justice, today a magistrate of the TC, Juan Carlos Campo. Congress approved the norm, with a comfortable and transversal majority of 205 deputies from whom the PP and Vox fell out, last August. And since its entry into force four months ago, it has become a nightmare with unpredictable consequences for the coalition government.
What does not change
the criminal type
The PSOE bill maintains the unification of the crimes of abuse and rape into a single type of sexual assault.
What does not change
Consent
And the plan preserves the threshold that gives entry to the regulation of punishments in the Criminal Code by maintaining the definition of consent in article 178.1 in its entirety. This is the precept that consecrates that “it will only be understood that there is consent when it has been freely expressed through acts that, in view of the circumstances of the case, clearly express the will of the person.”
what changes
The sorrows rise again
In order to avoid, as they maintain in the explanatory statement of their parliamentary initiative, unexpected reductions in sentences and “shielding the law in favor of the victims”, the Socialists retouch article 178 – the one that regulates the basic type of aggression without penetration- and 179 -the basic of rape- to return to the previous penological forks. That is, they propose to recover the sentences from one to 5 years in prison for the first case (now they were from one to 4 years, hence the advantage for sex offenders who have been able to benefit from the norm promoted by Equality); and from 6 to 12 years for rape, which had now been left at 4 at its lower limit.
what changes
Violence and intimidation
Its reintroduction is what justifies raising the criminal punishment. The PSOE proposes creating a new section 3 in article 178 to increase the sentence up to 5 years if “the aggression had been committed using violence or intimidation or on a victim who has his will annulled for any reason.” It is the same pattern that the Socialists follow to illuminate a second section in article 179, also newly created, so that the violation is again punished with 6 years in the lower part of the fork. These adjustments affect the list of aggravating circumstances of article 180.1.
Equality had agreed to reform the law before the order of Sánchez, to increase the penalties and toughen aggravating factors, but not to make violence and intimidation explicit again as premises to modulate the sentences upwards.
what changes
transitional law
Those responsible for United We Can have always maintained, led by Judge Victoria Rosell, that it was not necessary to specify how the new law should be applied in relation to the previous one because that is already included in the 1995 Penal Code. Jurists disagreed from the The principle of this conception and the government partners in fact introduced a nuance -a patch, by all accounts- in the ‘omnibus’ reform that suppressed sedition and attenuated embezzlement.
Now, the PSOE is concretized by the proposal for a second transitory provision, for the review of sentences, in which it states that the prisoner will be applied “the most favorable provision considered exhaustively and not by the exercise of judicial discretion”; that is, what the judges are doing by virtue of a basic and guaranteeing principle of the rule of law. But the socialists immediately include the safeguard to put a dam to the wave of criminal mitigations. When the sentences are imprisonment, “this organic law will not be considered more favorable when the duration of the previous sentence imposed on the act with its circumstances is also taxable in accordance with this reform of the Code.”
#PSOE #proposal #raises #penalties #rape #assault #penetration