EVEN AFTER everything that has happened to the country in the last few years, politicians still refuse to grow up. Behaving in a mature and responsible way seems to be beyond most of them as the mindless row, over the amendment of the law on the sexual abuse of minors, both at a House committee meeting and the plenum demonstrated.
It is quite astonishing that such a piece of legislation could divide the political parties and fuel angry rows among deputies. Tightening the legislation dealing with sex offenders, imposing harsher penalties on them and allowing the monitoring of their activities once they were out of prison are not an ideological issue and therefore no cause for political disagreements. For such a matter, deputies should be mature enough to work together with the sole purpose of offering better protection to minors.
Instead, deputies at the House legal affairs committee ended up exchanging barbs over who would amend the existing law. AKEL had drafted an amendment to the law which it wanted to submit at Thursday’s plenum for approval but met with opposition from DISY which argued there was no need for the amendment as the government had prepared a comprehensive bill that would make it superfluous.
The government’s bill would be a long-overdue ratification of the Lanzarote Convention of Council of Europe which stipulates the criminalisation of a long list of sexual offences against children. Cyprus signed the convention in 2007, but its failure to ratify it prompted a rebuke from the EU last December. How bizarre that AKEL’s deputies, who are now in a big hurry to pass their amendment, had done nothing about the ratification of the Convention for seven years – for five of those years their party was in government and could have drafted the necessary legislation.
The seven-year delay reflects badly on all the parties, none of which raised the issue in this time, presumably because there were not votes to be won from the Convention’s ratification. Now everyone is in a hurry, AKEL deputy Irini Charalambidou claiming that the amendment was a matter of urgency, because four convicted sex offenders were due for release this year. Had deputies not bothered pushing for the ratification all this time because none had been released the previous six years?
Perhaps, AKEL has decided that it could win some brownie points by submitting its amendment now that there is a highly-publicised, sexual abuse case in the courts. Nothing would surprise us given the irresponsibility, immaturity and petty-mindedness that rule political life. In the end, a majority voted for a two-week postponement of the vote on AKEL’s amendment bill at Thursday’s plenum, in which time the government bill should be submitted.
It is to be hoped committee discussions on the bill would not take long, because ratification of the Lanzarote Convention has already been delayed seven years.
