The self-declared republic of Somaliland has passed a law against rape for the first time.<\/p>\n
In the past, the victim could be forced to marry the rapist and the families would support such a resolution to hide the shame attached to rape.<\/p>\n
Rapists now stand to face at least 30 years in prison.<\/p>\n
Somaliland’s speaker of parliament, Bashe Mohamed Farah, told the BBC that rape cases have risen and he hoped the new law would help stop that trend.<\/p>\n
“Nowadays we have seen even people carrying out gang rapes,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The main emphasis of the new act is to completely stop rape.<\/p>\n
The new law has come in after years of lobbying by children and women’s rights advocates.<\/p>\n
Faisa Ali Yusuf of the Women’s Agenda Forum told the BBC they’ve been waiting for such legislation for a very long time.<\/p>\n
The BBC’s Anne Soy explains that this comes within the context of the self-declared republic being keen to be seen internationally as a viable democracy with functioning institutions.<\/p>\n
It declared itself independent from the rest of Somalia in 1991 but is not internationally recognised as a country.<\/p>\n
Our correspondent says there is still no law against rape in Somalia.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The self-declared republic of Somaliland has passed a law against rape for the first time. In the past, the victim could be forced to marry the rapist and the families would support such a resolution to hide the shame attached to rape. Rapists now stand to face at least 30 years in prison. Somaliland’s speaker […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":389819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[1892,1018],"class_list":["post-389818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","tag-rape","tag-somalia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=389818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/389819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=389818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=389818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=389818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}