Prosecutor General of Kazakhstan proposes to tighten the Criminal Code

A number of amendments to the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure were developed by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Kazakhstan. One of the main proposed changes is the toughening of punishment for crimes against the sexual integrity of minors. This was announced at the press conference in Nur-Sultan by Deputy Prosecutor General Marat Akhmetzhanov.

The developer of the bill, represented by the Prosecutor General’s Office, proposes to include the violence against children in the list of serious crimes.

“The commission of sexual violence against a minor now provides for life imprisonment or at least 20 years,” the Deputy Prosecutor General explained.

For failure to report and harboring facts of pedophilia, it is also proposed to tighten the sentence – up to 6 years in prison. Moreover, as the speaker noted, an additional sign of the commission of a crime will appear in the codes – “in the performance of official duties”. This means that the heads of orphanages, boarding schools and other specialized institutions for the concealment of violence against children in their institutions will be responsible to the fullest extent of the law.

It is also proposed to include drug trafficking via the Internet into the category of serious crimes with toughening sentences up to 15 years in prison.

“The responsibility for the use of electronic information resources for drug trafficking is being introduced. I believe that these amendments will help reduce these types of crimes. We live in a digital world. Unfortunately, criminals also use different technologies to distribute drugs. Therefore, responsibility is increasing here,” Akhmetzhanov noted.

If the bill is passed, poachers will have a hard time. In particular, according to Akhmetzhanov, it is proposed to transfer illegal hunting and fishing into the category of serious crimes.

“Measures will be taken to confiscate weapons, vehicles and property of poachers,” said the Deputy Prosecutor General. “Illegal hunting, illegal fishing should be transferred from the category of “misconduct” to the category of “medium crime”. That is, even for a single poaching, which did not cause significant damage and when the Red Book animals were not affected, poachers can get imprisonment. The current legislation provides for 40 days of arrest for such a crime.”

For systematic poaching, illegal hunting with significant damage, and the bag of rare species of animals and catch, the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic proposes to tighten the sentence to 6 years in prison; and for poaching in organized criminal groups – up to 10 years in prison.

Recall that the President of Kazakhstan, Kasym-Zhomart Tokaev, at a joint meeting of the chambers of Parliament on September 2 ordered to toughen penalties for rape, poaching and a number of other crimes.

“We urgently need to tighten the penalties for sexual violence, pedophilia, drug trafficking, human trafficking, domestic violence against women and serious crimes against the individual, especially against children. This is my assignment to Parliament and the Government,” the Head of state said then.