The Institutionality and Justice Foundation (Finjus) asked President Luis Abinader this morning to convene all the representative sectors of the country to develop policies and mechanisms to face the alarming wave of violence and crime that plagues the Dominican Republic.
He said that the political class cannot be left out of that call because they are issues in which all sectors have to be involved.
He said that the violence has overflowed in the country and said that on many occasions it finds its causes in poverty, inequalities and lack of opportunities.
Executive Vice President of FinjusServio Tulio Castaños Guzmán, also said that the project to reform the Penal Code is urgent because it is the only way to develop a State policy to deal with these scourges.
“I believe that the President of the Republic as head of state should convene different sectors, teachers, the private sector, trade unionists, educators, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, jurists in order to see how together we can design a policy of State that promotes peace”, he maintained.
He added that “in the current situation, many factors have converged, we are concluding a pandemic that has been unleashed in the world and has increased, that is, what is being experienced in the Dominican Republic is being experienced by the entire world, it is happening in all countries and there are also a series of factors that also come together, poverty, inequalities, lack of opportunities, lack of public policies”.
He argued that the present circumstances warrant that all sectors meet together with the government to specify the policies with which they can confront violence and citizen insecurity.
“It would be important to bring together the sectors that could eventually contribute to the design required by the circumstances to see how we promote, I repeat, a culture of peace,” said the civic leader.
He added that “there is also the issue of weapons, it seems that parents are lacking domestic training, those femicides that occur, that intra-family violence is often the lack of domestic training, of fathers who allow men to hit them to his brothers and the problem of machismo”.
He regretted that 67 percent of the acts of violence that affect the country are committed while people share in public places, such as colmadones, and in friction between vehicle drivers.
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He stated that the State has to rethink public policies to face the levels of violence that affect us at the moment.
Penal Code
Regarding the Penal Code, he affirmed that it has to be approved urgently in order to face many of the criminal acts that affect society.
“It is evident that the Penal Code must be approved, because at the end of the day we are applying a code from the 19th century, and the logic of the State changed above all with the Constitution of 2010, we went from a liberal State to a social State, democratic and legal and there are criminal types that are not contained in the current legislation, and that are contained in the proposal that rests in the National Congress”.
He added that “it is important that the Penal Code be approved because although it does not prevent, but rather intervenes, the reality is that a penal code is the main tool for designing an effective policy of persecution.”
