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Zagreb - Both the ruling and opposition parties on Wednesday commended a set of judicial laws that bring stricter penalties for domestic violence, ensure faster criminal proceedings and bring additional protection for some professions such as social workers and teachers.
Amendments to the Penal Code, the Criminal Procedure Act and the Act on Protection against Domestic Violence bring stricter penalties to ensure better protection of victims of certain crimes, notably domestic violence.
As regards domestic violence, the minimum penalty in the future will be one year in prison as against the current penalty of three months' imprisonment.
The criminal act of sexual intercourse without consent is deleted and incorporated in the criminal act of rape. Penalties for rape are increased and range from one to 10 years in prison.
Under the amendments to the Penal Code, an attack on a social worker or a teacher will be treated as an attack on an official. Also, criminal libel is deleted from the legislation, said the State Secretary at the Justice Ministry, Juro Martinovic.
SDP MP says health sector workers should have been granted additional protection as well
Social Democrat MP Sabina Glasovac commended the government's amendments but noted that more could have been done to better protect women who were intimately related to perpetrators of violence but were not in a marital or common-law relationship. She particularly pointed to violence in adolescent relationships.
Her party colleague Pedja Grbin, too, commended the changes to the Penal Code but added that medical workers, too, should have been granted additional protection.
With regard to criminal proceedings, Grbin said that in the Croatian judicial system there was no room for a high criminal court.
"The Supreme Court has around 14,500 pending cases, of which 95% are civil cases, while only around 700 are criminal cases. That can be resolved by hiring a judge at the Supreme Court rather than establishing a new, high criminal court that will cost HRK 15 million annually," he said.
Goran Beus Richembergh of the GLAS party group said his party would support the stricter penalties and faster procedures in cases of domestic violence considering resistance to the implementation of the Istanbul Convention.
Dragana Jeckov of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) said that in Croatia every 15 minutes a women is abused and that 17.5% of women have been raped or experienced an attempted rape.
Members of parliament also supported the final bill on juvenile courts, which has been aligned with EU law in the part that refers to the treatment of juvenile suspects or indictees in criminal cases.