French members of parliament have voted unanimously to make “psychological violence” within a couple an offense punishable by up to three years in prison as part of new measures aimed at improving protection for victims of domestic abuse.
Politicians from the left and right supported the passing of the law, which singles out “repeated” verbal actions intended to hurt the victim’s rights and dignity or their physical or mental health. As well as a jail sentence, offenders could be ordered to pay a fine of up to 75,000 euros (US$102,000).
Supporters of the law say an estimated 8 percent of women in France are psychologically abused by their partner. Chantal Brunel, a member of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s majority Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, described it as “a preventive measure as psychological violence always precedes [physical] blows.”
TAGGED
The law includes a clause under which people who have been ordered to stay away from their partners could be forced to wear an electronic tag. Nadine Morano, the junior family minister, said this would be an experimental measure only taken initially in limited areas.
In wider efforts to protect abuse victims, a four-month-long “protection order” would allow judges to evict the violent partner from the family home or, if the victim decided to leave, to arrange rehousing and provisionally grant child custody.
In France in 2008, 156 women are known to have been killed by a husband, partner or boyfriend. According to the government, 675,000 women have been the victims of violent abuse over the past two years.
UNUSUAL
There was unusual political consensus in the passing of the bill brought by a socialist member of parliament and a representative of the right-wing UMP.
It must now go to the senate for approval.
However, there is division in legal circles as to how applicable the new law will prove. Critics have said it will be hard to know where to draw the line between insults and arguments on the one hand, and abuse on the other.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS