A controversial decision. The High Constitutional Court of Madagascar validated and toughened on February 23 a bill passed by the country’s Parliament establishing the castration of perpetrators of rape against minors. A sentence of chemical castration will now be automatically pronounced “against perpetrators of rape committed against a child under ten years of age”. However, it will be left to the discretion of the judges for older victims.
The HCC magistrates even went further than the Parliamentarians’ initial request. The first version of the text in fact imposed penalties of surgical or chemical castration. However, the magistrates considered that chemical castration, “having a temporary and reversible nature”, went against the desire “to definitively neutralize” child criminals.
But this decision provoked the ire of certain associations who saw it as an inappropriate response. This definitive sanction “trivializes the stereotypical image of the isolated rapist”, but “in Madagascar there is a culture of rape which takes place within homes, in the close environment of children and adolescents”, regretted Marie-Christina Kolo, who created the Women Break the Silence movement, according to our colleagues in Le Monde.
Even before the text was validated, the NGO Amnesty International deplored “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”. These sentences are not compatible “with Malagasy constitutional provisions against torture and ill-treatment, nor with regional and international standards relating to human rights,” she added.
The Minister of Justice, Landy Mbolatiana Randriamanantenasoa, however, defended herself to the AFP by declaring that Madagascar is “a sovereign country which has every right to modify its laws” in the general interest. “Faced with the increase in rape, we had to act” to “curb” the phenomenon, she continued, listing 600 cases of rape of minors last year.
