A Chinese lawmaker has called for amendment to or judicial interpretation of the country's existing Criminal Law to severely punish those making sexual assaults on victims of the same sex.

"Same-sex sexual assaults seriously harm personal dignity and undermine social morality, but under the current criminal law the offenders often get away with light punishment," said Fan Yi, a deputy to the 10th National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, in its annual full session which opened Monday.

 

According to Fan, China's old Criminal Law enacted in 1979 used to include a clause defining sexual assaults between same sex, mainly male to male, as a crime. "It stipulated that sodomy should be punished as a 'crime of indecent assault'," he said.

 

The crime of indecent assault was discarded and replaced by four specific criminal offenses when the Criminal Law currently effective was adopted in 1997, but same-sex sexual assaults was not mentioned at all, Fan explained.

 

"As a result, the courts could hardly find any legal basis to punish those same-sex attackers as rapists, and often had to render light sentences on them after convicting them of other offenses," he added.

 

In recent years, Chinese media have reported cases in which male employees were sexually harassed or abused by their same-sex bosses, but the police couldn't even file a criminal investigation due to the lack of a solid legal foundation.

 

Fan, who is president of foreign languages college of Ningbo University in east China's Zhejiang Province, said that he plans to submit a motion to the ongoing NPC session regarding the issue.

 

"I suggest either the existing Criminal Law be amended to add the crime of same-sex sexual assault, which should receive the same punishment as the crime of rape, or the Supreme People's Court give a judicial interpretation to define same-sex sexual assault as a form of rape," Fan noted.

 

As a "violent crime" often targeting children and teenagers, said Fan, same-sex sexual assault must be severely punished to " deter potential offenders".

 

(Xinhua News Agency March 6, 2007)