The East Timorese Ministry of Justice is preparing a penal code that would decriminalize many abortions, but with little visible public support and no public debate, civic groups are questioning the law’s origins.
The law, which is similar to abortion laws in Australia, Timor’s southern neighbor, and Portugal, East Timor’s former colonial power, would make abortions available to women if the pregnancy threatened the life, physical or mental health of the mother.
East Timor does not have its own penal code and instead relies on an old Indonesian penal code. That penal code outlaws abortion.
Fernanda Borges, the only female party leader in parliament, has accused foreign legal advisers and the UN of pushing the law against the will of Timor’s 1 million people, the majority of whom are devoutly Catholic.
“People like [the UN Population Fund] think it’s great because it’ll reduce population size, but that’s not the point,” Borges said. “The point is development.”
The UN Population Fund has been working in East Timor since the country’s break from Indonesia in 1999, but agency representative Hernando Agudelo said it does not promote abortion.
“We are respectful of cultural principles in this country,” he said. “In Timor the people are against abortion, so we must respect this culture’s beliefs.”
Agudelo said the agency had never been consulted about any abortion laws and he believed the law was written by Portuguese legal advisers within the ministry.
Borges said she, too, suspected Portuguese advisers had a hand in the abortion law as Portugal just passed a similar law last year.
Borges called the abortion law, “a Western thing. I’m against the idea of Western culture that says abortions are a way to reduce population size.”
Even Timorese women’s leaders who have pushed publicly for decriminalization say there ought to have been more public debate on the draft.
“The public should have a say in this because it affects our culture,” said Merita Alves, the head of the East Timor’s Popular Women Organization the oldest women’s rights group in the country.
Last week the draft penal code went before the parliament.
Under the Constitution the parliament has the right to debate the draft code and can approve or reject it. But the parliament chose to give authority to the justice ministry instead.
Alves said her group would support a law like the one in the draft code, but no one from the ministry had spoken with her group.
“They haven’t asked our opinion and there’s not yet been any debate,” she said. “I think the government should at least open itself up to have a debate about this.”
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
RSS