The drafters of the Sexual Offences Bill are investigating the cost of providing anti-retroviral treatment to rape victims, Parliament’s justice portfolio committee heard on Wednesday.
This is despite a cabinet decision, taken last month, to remove from the draft measure a clause that would have compelled government to provide rape victims with prophylactic drugs to help prevent them from contracting Aids.
Briefing members on the Bill, state law adviser Johan de Lange said: ”We are busy determining the implications of that [the provision of the anti-retroviral drugs].”
The cabinet decision has drawn a fierce response from opposition parties, with the New National Party on Monday asking whether government was saying the lives of rape victims were not worth R200, the estimated cost of the treatment.
Speaking in the committee meeting on Wednesday, Sheila Camerer of the Democratic Alliance, who has vowed to fight the exclusion ”tooth and nail”, asked De Lange if there was any hope the clause might be reinstated.
The question was intercepted by his namesake, committee chair Johnny de Lange, who replied that it might be revisited, ”but the clause as it is now will never be passed in this country”.
”Nowhere in the world does a country provide such treatment,” he said.
The chair said he was angry that proposals such as the clause (formerly section 21 of the Bill) were made without proper costing.
”They make these proposals in a vacuum, in a country that is half Third World and half First World, that all the cost would be borne by the state — without costing it,” he said.
Camerer said the bill was unbalanced.
”It is ironic that victims cannot have their problems put into the Bill, but in black and white the perpetrators are provided for,” she said.
The Bill makes provision for drug and alcohol treatment for sexual offenders for a period of five years, although the court can order that a perpetrator bear the cost of the treatment.
”All provisions for victims have been removed, while the criminals get their share,” Camerer said.
However, she was encouraged to hear section 21 was at least still being costed.
It is not known how long the costing of the defunct clause will take.
Johnny de Lange said he was also angry about sections of the Bill that allowed the court to declare a witness in a sexual offences trial a ”vulnerable witness”.
”I am flabbergasted by this. You are creating categories of people in courts. I am absolutely stunned,” he said.
However, Camerer said the clause would prevent secondary victimisation.
”When we (the committee) visited sexual offences courts we found that the processes to prevent secondary victimisation were not in place,” she said.
Johnny de Lange said the Bill also contained a clause providing for a ”vulnerable witness” to give evidence through a closed circuit TV, an intermediary, or any other measure that the court deemed just and appropriate.
”Does every court in this country that deals with rape and other sexual offences have a closed circuit television,” he asked.
The chair was further incensed when he was told that this, too, had not been costed.
”You promise this to the public without costing it. It makes me furious, because at the end of the day we are lying to the public. We cost these things to make sure we have budgets,” he said. -Sapa