Caribbean & Central America - April 2014 (ISSN 1741-4458)

After years of failed attempts at reforming the Dominican Republic (DR)’s penal code (CPP), the government led by President Danilo Medina now has in its hands a congressionally-approved initiative to overhaul the CPP, aimed at better combating the high levels of criminality and violence currently afflicting the country. While reducing crime and violence is one of the government’s main goals, Medina has hesitated to promulgate the initiative amid concerns expressed by civil society groups and even government officials regarding some of the proposed changes.

Plans to reform the CPP have been in the pipeline since 2004 when the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD) administration, led by former president Leonel Fernández (1996-2000; 2004-2012), first presented plans to overhaul it. While the PLD enjoyed a comfortable majority in congress under Fernández, introducing changes to the CPP was such a complex and politically sensitive task that PLD legislators could not fully agree on a single set of proposals and the issue was left on the backburner.

Last year however PLD legislators revived the initiative as part of the government’s efforts to tackle the rising levels of insecurity, in line with promises made by Medina made during his electoral campaign. After months of debate, a draft bill amending 75 CPP articles was approved by the (PLD-dominated) chamber of deputies in June 2013. It took the (also PLD-dominated) senate ten months to get round to discussing the bill which then sent a revised version back down to the lower chamber. While the deputies rejected the senate’s modifications and it looked like the initiative would remain in congressional limbo, in an unexpected move, on 27 March, the senate approved the version drafted by the lower chamber.

Senator José Rafael Vargas (PLD), a member of the senate’s justice committee, said that senators felt compelled to approve the lower chamber’s version of the bill fearing that failure to do so would result in the “death of the initiative”. However, Vargas said that this did not mean that the senate liked the bill. In fact Vargas said that in coming months he and his colleagues would seek to introduce amendments to the reformed CPP in order to reconcile it with some of the rejected recommendations made by the senate.

Given the circumstances surrounding the approval of the CPP reform bill, it came under intense scrutiny and before long, criticisms began to emerge. On 31 March a group of local criminal law experts publicly called on President Medina to veto the bill, arguing that some of the proposed changes go counter to the constitution and international treaties undersigned by the DR. The group cited as an example a proposal to re-establish mandatory preventative detention for all crimes which it claims would violate the presumption of innocence principle as established by the DR’s 2010 constitution and the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights (also known as the Pact of San José) to which the DR signed up.

Meanwhile National District Prosecutor Yeni Berenice Reynoso has singled out proposed amendments to CPP article 85 which would prevent citizens from personally suing sitting government officials for acts of administrative misconduct, reserving such actions for the public ministry. Reynoso argues that this represents a setback to efforts to have a more transparent and accountable government. Reynoso’s point was quickly picked up by the civil society group Asociación Dominicana Contra la Corrupción (Adocco) and Guillermo Moreno, the leader of the opposition Alianza País, who argue that this change would only provide protection for corruption (see sidebar). Tackling official corruption was another of Medina’s electoral promises, making such arguments difficult to ignore. This may explain why Medina has failed to sanction the bill even though the president of senate, Reinaldo Pared Pérez, confirmed on 4 April that it had already been submitted to the presidential palace.

• Adocco and Moreno’s objections

Guillermo Moreno argues that the proposed changes to CPP article 85 are nothing more than an attempt by Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD) legislators to “consolidate the impunity regime that benefits the mafias that dominate Dominican politics” and he has called on all Dominicans to demonstrate against the bill to prevent its promulgation. Meanwhile on 7 April Asociación Dominicana Contra la Corrupción (Adocco) issued a public statement in which it rejected the proposed changes to article 85 on the grounds that they “eliminate citizens’ rights to formally denounce acts of misconduct by public officials, seeking to protect official corruption”. Adocco has said that if the bill is promulgated, it will immediately denounce it as unconstitutional before the local constitutional court and even the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.