Rogue NRI hubbies may lose properties
THE WOMEN AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT MINISTRY ALSO REITERATED THAT IT WILL ASK FOR THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS TO BE RELAXED FOR CHILD SEX ABUSE CASES
The government is considering crucial changes in criminal law that will allow for the confiscation of the property of NRI men for deserting their wives and not responding to repeated notices issued to them, Union women and child development (WCD) minister Maneka Gandhi said on Monday.
The WCD ministry is also writing to the Union home ministry (MHA) to indefinitely increase the time limit for reporting cases of child sexual abuse including molestation from the current rule that says this has to be done within three years of commission of the offence, as first reported by Hindustan Times on February 1.
WCD secretary Rakesh Srivastava said the ministry has sought an amendment in the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) that will allow notification of a summons hosted on the website of Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to be treated as “deemed to have been served.”
“If three such notices have been served and the person does not appear, it will be assumed that he is evading summons and the person will be treated as an absconder. The enforcement agencies will be authorized to attach the property of such persons and their families. The MEA has already written to MHA proposing the changes to CrPC ,” Srivastava said at a press conference on Monday.
The current practice is that once a woman lodges a complaint, the police writes to embassies which, in turn, try to serve summons — a process that rarely works. Recommendations suggesting these changes were suggested by an inter-ministerial panel headed by external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj to review the legal and regulatory challenges faced by women deserted by NRI men. “The change in law will ensure that the person appears before the law enforcement agencies,” Srivastava said.
Separately, Gandhi took up the issue of increasing the statute if limitations on child abuse after a woman of Indian origin from Canada met her last month and narrated how she had been abused when she was a child.
“We are in the process of writing to MHA asking them to amend Section 473 of the CrPC that will allow court to take cognizance of an offence even after the expiry of the period of limitation provided,” Gandhi said.
The minister admits that there could be a problem revisiting old cases of crime. “Only problem I envisage is that how do you prove it? (But) The best we can hope is that people get frightened that they could land in trouble (anytime and not do this),” she added.
As per the statute of limitations, if an offence is punishable with a fine then it has to be reported within six months. In the case of molestation where the maximum imprisonment is three years, statutory time limit for reporting the incident is three years. There is no such limitation while reporting rape cases.