MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
City if Buenos Aires criminalises street harassment
Fines of up to 60 US$ for street harassment. Also community work? The Buenos Aires City Hall Wednesday passed a bill establishing fines of up to 1,000 pesos (around US$ 60) for those who commit sexual harassment in public places. Prevention campaigns have also been announced.
The main goal is to “prevent and punish sexual harassment committed in public spaces” against people who are “harassed, mistreated or intimidated,” affecting “their dignity, their freedom and their rights to free transit and to physical or moral integrity based on their gender, identity and sexual orientation,” one of the lawmakers behind the project explained.
According to the new law, verbal or physical sexual harassment “is any unidirectional, physical or verbal behavior, produced by one or more persons against persons, based on their gender, identity and sexual orientation that they do not wish or reject these behaviors to consider which affects their rights to dignity and integrity.”
However, legal scholars have raised doubts about the effectiveness or even the validity of this measure since the national Constitution clearly specifies that penal matters are only for the national Congress to legislate upon. “There's only one penal law for the entire country,” a legal counselor explained. “The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires is autonomous in that it is not a province, which does not supersede the authority of the national Congress,” she added.
On the other hand, those who support the measure say that street harassment will fall under the category of “misdemeanor,” making it perfectly legal, like a traffic regulation or a bylaw providing for places and times of day where alcohol can be consumed.
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Read all commentsPerhaps the comment was a little too subtle for Fidelito. I'd ruin it for everyone else if I were to mention the allusion to the effects of inveterate Argentine inflation and the recent announcements of record-low of the ARS vs the USD, as well as the observation that the maximum fine for the transgression in the article is a piddly 1000 ARS or the current equivalent of about US$60, less than a parking ticket in Chicago.
Dec 09th, 2016 - 01:32 pm +2It's unfortunate that Fidelito and many of the other unwashed prefer to think of Argentines as a “race” while the civilised world considers the country to be multi-racial. We can only speculate whether it was Argentina's contact with the Croatians that eventually allowed the country to rise above the practice of living in mud huts and a subsistence diet of grubs and Fernet.
As far as Fidelito's mention of alcohol, which has nothing to do with the original article other than to attempt to distract: Argentina is the second-largest per-capita consumer of alcohol in the entire Western Hemisphere. According to national stats here, alcohol is involved in about 50 percent of the traffic fatalities in this country, which has no shortage of such accidents (although we see that Kirchnerism tried to suppress some of the bad press on the high traffic fatality rates). Even with suspected under-reporting, Argentina's traffic fatality rates require the use of larger pieces of graph paper, at something well over 28 per 100000 if you use the numbers from the national Instituto de Seguridad Vial (though that number gets whitewashed on its way to international reporting and so Argentina offers less than half of the suspected real rate when reporting to the WHO) . Sample international assessment of AR reporting during the Kirchner regime: “...our analysis of the death registration data shows that the police data substantially under-report road traffic deaths in Argentina...” Article “Los Kirchner falsearon las estadisticas de inseguridad vial.”
A fine of 1000 pesos.
Dec 08th, 2016 - 08:28 pm +1Soon to be worth US$1.26
@ TTT
Dec 09th, 2016 - 10:59 am +1Why not make a positive contribution and comment on the story? What do you think of piropos? Do you whistle and call at women? Is it outdated and should have no place in a modern Argentina? Or is it a bit of fun?
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