Cuba authorised a brand new penal code including public dysfunction as a criminal offense

Cuba up to date the checklist of crimes in its penal code, now tackling environmental crimes, cyber criminality, gender violence but in addition public dysfunction.

The Nationwide Meeting of Folks’s Energy of Cuba voted on the brand new penal code of the nation on Could 15 in a rare session. It provides public dysfunction as a criminal offense.

Individuals who insult high-ranking public officers could withstand three years in jail. Anybody who “helps, encourages, funds, supplies, receives or has of their possession funds, materials or monetary sources” from non-governmental organizations or worldwide establishments that can be utilized to “pay for actions in opposition to the State and its constitutional order” could be charged with as much as 10 years of jail.

Activists and opponents have denounced that the brand new code seeks to silence social protest, activism and impartial journalism. Final July, distinctive protests reached the streets of Cuba throughout which authorities indicted 790 folks for acts of vandalism, together with 115 minor Cubans between 16 and 18 years outdated, whereas for months the nation had denied having jailed anybody.

Prison legal responsibility in Cuba is maintained to start out at 16 years outdated.

The brand new code can penalize international financing of non-governmental organizations and media, a software sometimes used to limit freedom of speech.

Propaganda from the enemy is now known as propaganda in opposition to the constitutional order.

Supporters of the brand new penal code describe it as an up to date model from 1987 because it didn’t sort out environmental crimes, cyber criminality or gender violence.

The brand new penal code provides 37 new crimes such because the crime of “public dysfunction,” carried out in teams or individually. The loss of life penalty is feasible for 23 several types of crime, 4 lower than within the earlier code. Lawmaker María Armenia Yi Reina stated she was in opposition to the loss of life penalty as a result of, as a Catholic individual, loss of life can solely happen via pure causes.

The final loss of life sentence was pronounced in 2003 in opposition to three individuals who hijacked a ship throughout protests.

Feminists lamented femicide was not integrated as a criminal offense. Mariela Castro Espín, Raúl Castro’s daughter, requested on Sunday for the time period femicide to be added to the code however Rubén Remigio Ferro, the chief justice of the Supreme Folks’s Courtroom of Cuba, argued it already encompassed it underneath the time period gender violence.

The brand new code shall be enforced in 90 days and, not like the brand new household code, won’t be submitted to public session or a referendum.

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