Thank you, Madam Chair. In the same spirit that the Chair addressed this, can I likewise wish members of the House everything of the best over the festive season and may I congratulate you, Madam Chair, on your festive headgear.
Let me assure the House right at the start that the DA supports this Bill. We do not do it holding our noses, as many of us did when we supported the messy Civil Union Bill earlier in the week. The DA regards this legislation as an important reform measure, which is long overdue. The fact that we are rushing it through the National Assembly on this last day of the year's session, ahead of the sixteen days of activism against violence against women and children, is better than not doing it at all.
That having been said, it is certainly not a perfect piece of legislation, as the justice portfolio committee itself recognises, and that has been documented in detail in our report to the National Assembly on the agenda today.
A number of issues have been left hanging in the air. For instance, the criminalising of a person's nondisclosure of his or her HIV status has been left out for further consideration by the department.
The issue of adult prostitution has been dealt with in a piecemeal and possibly unsatisfactory way, the Constitutional Court's decision notwithstanding, partly because it is currently subject to a review by the SA Law Reform Commission, and the issue of rehabilitation of offenders has been left out for further study. Nevertheless, it is a vast improvement on what we had before.
An unanswered question is why we had to wait so long for the law dealing with sexual offences to be reformed. After all, the previous Sexual Offences Act dates way back to 1957. It is true that the SA Law Commission spent several years researching a new legal regime for sexual offences. I think the Minister mentioned that this Bill has been 12 years in the making.
However, the ANC government only introduced the new Bill to Parliament in 2003. This was extensively discussed and amended after 128 submissions were received on the draft Bill, and after a week of public hearings. The process, however, came to a halt in February 2004, ahead of the April general election. The Bill then failed to return to Parliament for two and a half years. Several promises by the Minister in the interim to bring the Bill back, given to me among other members during this period, failed to materialise. It appears the public outcry around the Zuma rape trial was persuasive in the Bill's return, which occurred shortly afterwards in June this year.
The Bill before the House is now very ambitious. Its object is to completely overhaul the law relating to sexual offences, as has been outlined by the Chair. It's far-reaching, comprehensive and a very complicated piece of legislation which breaks a lot of new ground.
Among other things, the Bill repeals the common law offence of rape and replaces it with the new expanded, nongender-specific statutory offence of rape applicable to all forms of sexual penetration. This quantum leap was necessary in terms of the Constitution and will establish South Africa's legislation as among the most progressive on sexual offences. Sexual assault, previously indecent assault, is similarly dealt with.
The Bill also creates a host of new statutory offences criminalising certain sexual acts as well as introducing new sexual offences against children and mentally disabled persons.
Perhaps one of the most positive aspects of the Bill is that it introduces a number of provisions intended to protect children against sexual predators, paedophiles and pornography. Importantly, and in line with the Constitution, the Bill eliminates the differentiation between the age of consent for boys and girls, so that it is now 16 for both. A troublesome aspect of this change, however, for children, boys particularly, between the ages of 16 and 18 is their vulnerability at this time to adult sexual predators, which has been pointed out in the justice committee's report, and we say that this aspect requires further research.
The Bill introduces new dimensions to the consequences of sexual offences in that it provides that certain services must be afforded by the state to rape victims who report the rape either at a police station or at a designated state hospital - for instance, the right to receive post- exposure prophylaxis against HIV infection at designated state hospitals within 72 hours and the right to apply for the alleged perpetrator to be tested for HIV.
These are important reforms, insisted upon by the portfolio committee as a result of pressure from civil society and the input from the SA Law Reform Commission. However, they do not, in our view, go far enough. One of the DA's main concerns is that the provisions ensuring that a rape victim or a child victim of sexual offence would be treated by the court as a vulnerable witness in the earlier version of the Bill, which served before Parliament previously, have now been removed from the Bill before us today. The DA believes these provisions are necessary to prevent secondary trauma.
It is true that the Criminal Procedure Act has been amended to include watered-down elements of the SA Law Reform Commission's original proposals in this regard, but in our view this is not sufficient protection. It has been argued that to afford complainants in rape and sexual assault cases this status would be too costly in terms of the extra facilities and services that need to be made available, but we do not accept that this is a good reason. All our experiences of sexual offences courts make the case for the inclusion of this provision; in fact, they cry out for it. Properly equipped sexual offences courts yield double the conviction rate of other courts.
Another important issue in the Bill is the establishment of a national register for sex offenders. This is regarded as controversial in some quarters, and creates wide and possibly burdensome obligations on those working with children, but the DA agrees that the establishment and maintenance of this register is vitally important for the better protection of vulnerable children and the mentally disabled.
And, for the first time, trafficking in persons for sexual purposes has been outlawed in legislation by way of an interim provision in the Bill, pending the finalisation of proposals by the SA Law Reform Commission. The inclusion of this transitional measure was initiated by the DA, as we had already promoted legislation by way of a private member's Bill and had made proposals to the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, which had been accepted.
For all these reasons, we support the Bill. However, we have some reservations about certain aspects, particularly the late introduction of a provision criminalising the soliciting of sexual services from prostitutes, as we have indicated, and also a fairly dubious extraterritorial jurisdiction over sexual offenders, which, we believe, could possibly be contested in the Constitutional Court. But save for these problems we believe the Bill, though complicated, is satisfactory and a vast improvement on what we had before. Thank you very much. [Applause.]