The Autonomous Women’s Center is publishing its comments and proposals, which it submitted to the Ministry of Justice on April 15, 2019, as a working group member.
The Ministry of Justice has, unfortunately, not accepted any of the proposals made by the Autonomous Women’s Center, in the Draft of April 22,2019. These primarily refer to the prevention of perpetrators of these criminal acts, so that when they perpetrate the crime for the first time or they commit a milder form of the act, they are put under longer and stricter control of state bodies, in order to prevent the committing of the most severe forms of the criminal acts of murder and rape.
The Autonomous Women’s Center points out that it disagrees with the proposal for the introduction of the sanction of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the most severe criminal acts, if this solution envisages the possibility of either a prison sentence of up to 20 years or life imprisonment. This amendment will, paradoxically be to the detriment of murdered victims, that is, their families, because the majority of judges, due to the lack of sanctions between the two given options, will opt for the milder sanction of prison for 20 years.
This standpoint of the Autonomous Women’s Center is based on data of the Republic Statistical Office for 2017, which show that courts pronounced the prison sentence of 40 years in only 2 of 51 cases of aggravated murder, and prison sentences from 30 to 40 years in 11 cases.