Changes to Spain’s recently reformed rape law got the final legislative approval on Wednesday, April 26, to the relief of the county’s women and its ruling socialist party. The changes passed in the Senate, ending the controversy over the failed attempt to make it easier to prosecute rape.
The initial reform of Spain’s sexual crimes law, best known by its nickname, ‘Solo Sí es Sí’ (only yes is yes) was first passed earlier this legislative session. The law removed the crime of sexual abuse from the penal code to make it easier to legally define non-consensual sexual acts as assault, considered a worse offense.
But the law also lowered the minimum sentence for the crimes, resulting in sentence reductions for violent sexual assailants already convicted and, in some cases, their immediate release from prison. The Spanish constitution provides that the most favourable version of laws be applied to prisoners, so thousands of convicts asked to have their sentences reviewed. Over the months that the ‘Solo Sí es Sí’ law was in effect, almost 1,000 sentences were reduced, in approximately 100 cases leading to prisoners being released.
The law was the work of the Ministry of Equality, run by Irene Montero from the neo-communist party Unidos Podemos, the minority group in the socialist-led coalition government. Multiple experts had warned that the law would trigger sentence reductions, but Montero insisted on passing it as written by her ministry, and socialist President Pedro Sánchez acquiesced.
But the backlash proved to be too much, and Sánchez’s party had to swallow the bitter pill of turning to the opposition—the Partido Popular, and Ciudadanos—to clean up the reform and end the scandal of reduced sentences.
The just-passed reform reintroduces a double criminal scale to punish more serious sexual crimes perpetrated using violence, intimidation, or with the victim’s will annulled, for example by drugs.The new reform will not immediately stop sentence reductions, as there are still convicts who will be able to take advantage of the window of the first reform but Sánchez and the socialists are hoping they have acted fast enough to make the law a non-issue in elections.
