Zvamaida Murwira — Senior Reporter
ZIMBABWE's criminal code will soon criminalise deliberate infection of children with any sexually transmitted disease as an extra jailable offence, besides the underage sex, and lodge owners face prosecution if they are complicit in renting rooms to someone for sexual activity with a child.
While the Criminal Law and Codification and Reform Amendment Bill primarily raises the age of consent from 16 to 18 in compliance with how the courts have interpreted the Constitution's restriction of marriage to those aged 18 and over, the opportunity has been taken to fill in gaps identified by Government.
After robust debate in the National Assembly last week, the Bill passed that hurdle after Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi, who was steering the Bill through Parliament, agreed to amendments on some proposals and proposed additional amendments to offer children greater protection.
Today, the proposed law will be presented in the Senate.
Minister Ziyambi commended legislators for passing the Bill after a robust debate. "I want to thank the Honourable Members from both sides for the excellent work that was done in ensuring that we come up with these provisions that protect our children from sexual predators. There was a gap and we needed to deal with this.
"We are also thankful to His Excellency, the President, for putting in a stop gap measure to ensure that our children are protected. I want to applaud the House for diligently going through this Bill and passing it," said Minister Ziyambi.
During debate at committee stage of the Bill, Minister Ziyambi tabled amendments which criminalise intentional transmission of STIs to a child, which will include syphilis, gonorrhoea, herpes, HIV among others.
"A court convicting a person for any crime constituting unlawful sexual conduct against a child shall, if it also convicts that person for deliberately infecting that child with a sexually-transmitted disease, not make any part of the sentence of imprisonment imposed for the latter crime run concurrently with any sentence of imprisonment imposed for the first-mentioned crime," reads the amendment.
A previous proposal in the draft Bill that reintroduced criminalising deliberate infection with HIV for everyone, regardless of the age of the person infected, was dropped, but the wilful infection of children was strengthened.
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The draft Bill saw the need after raising of the age of consent to give discretion to the Prosecutor-General on whether to prosecute when the couple were close in age.
This remains in the final version passed by the National Assembly, but the Prosecutor-General first needs to refer a case involving juvenile offenders to a probation officer before the National Prosecuting Authority decides whether to prosecute them or not.
"There may be a consistent behaviour that may be picked by the probation officer in that particular individual. If they are first timers, I do not think that the probation officer will then prefer that without any reasonable cause because the Prosecutor General will interrogate that report and be able to satisfy herself that the case should be prosecuted," said Minister Ziyambi.
There was, however, heated debate on Clause 8, which criminalises owners of brothels or lodges that would be complicit in the sexual exploitation of children. Legislators argued it was not easy for proprietors of lodges to tell if their rooms were used for nefarious activities.
There is also a Clause on how to deal with instances when an accused person provided a defence that he believed a child under 18 was older owing to her physical appearance.
The PG is obliged to provide evidence showing that the accused indeed knew that the child was below the age of consent. This is the position in the courts today with the lower age of consent.
