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Cuba toughens its Penal Code thinking about the new digital activism

Cuba toughens its Penal Code thinking about the new digital activism

As explained by its own authors, the Code “protects the socialist political and state system, from the set of actions and activities that are committed against the constitutional order and with the purpose of creating a climate of social instability and a state of ungovernability.”

As soon as it was published as a project on the website of the Attorney General’s Office in March, the text aroused rejection among dissidents against the communist government.

“The new Penal Code is a new twist for the regime to intensify the repression against citizens,” René Gómez Manzano, president of the Corriente Agramontista, the oldest organization of Cuban opposition lawyers, told AFP.

This project is part of a series of laws, such as food sovereignty, the family code and personal data, intended to complement the new Constitution approved just in 2019.

In the extraordinary meeting that Parliament will hold on Saturday, several of these bills will be presented to the plenary, including the Penal Code to be voted on by the deputies.

“It is striking that, unlike the Family Code, this new legal body is being cooked in a reserved manner,” warns Gómez, a 77-year-old lawyer, ex-political prisoner and dissident activist.

The Family Code, which includes the legalization of gay marriage, the “solidarity” womb and the recognition of several parents, has been highly publicized and submitted to a wide popular consultation, to later be put to a referendum.

The Criminal Code classifies 37 new crimes related to “telecommunications, information technologies and communication“, the authors explain, a multidisciplinary team specially designated for its elaboration.

It is a way of responding to the arrival of the mobile Internet to Cuba since the end of 2018, which has shaken Cuban civil society and generated other areas of possible crimes, including political ones.

This legislation also comes after the historic demonstrations of July 11 and 12 in Cuba, the largest in 60 years, which left one dead, dozens injured and more than 1,300 detainees, many of whom have been sentenced to death. sentences up to 30 years.

“It is not the Penal Code that Cuba needs,” jurist Harold Bertot, until recently an academic at the University of Havana, now in Madrid, told AFP. “Chronologically, its discussion and eventual implementation coincide at a time of political and social tension in Cuba,” he estimates.

The Code “is committed to penal expansionism, tougher sentences, and (is) designed to have a notable impact on Cuban political activism,” he adds.

In the text, a figure is added to the crime of “public disorder” that penalizes individual or group demonstrations, while in acts “against the security of the State” another figure is inserted to punish the external financing of non-legal activities.

Opposition digital media outlets, activists and dissident groups are accused of being “mercenaries” for receiving funding from US agencies and NGOsfor which they could now be prosecuted with sentences of four to ten years in prison.

“In a country where private media are illegal and journalists do not have the possibility of obtaining local financing, prohibiting foreign financing is a death sentence for independent journalism,” the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reacted in February. ).

Thus, the current crime of “enemy propaganda” becomes “propaganda against the constitutional order”, while crimes against public order will include the “dissemination of false news or malicious predictions in order to cause alarm, discontent or disinformation”, the authors of the Code point out.

Bertot also considers that the law provides for “a not insignificant number of crimes of the death penalty as a sanction, even when its ‘exceptional’ character is recognized, it goes in the opposite direction to criminal tendencies in the American continent itself that have opted for its abolition”.

In the first decades of the Cuban revolution, “el paredón”, capital punishment by firing squad, was frequently applied as a deterrent. Since 2000, however, a de facto moratorium was applied, which was only broken in April 2003, with the execution of three hijackers of a boat with 50 passengers in the bay of Havana, trying to emigrate.

Source: Ambito

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