Tanzania Express, 28 August 1997

Amnesty pities child molesters

While various religious leaders, parliamentarians, government leaders and pressure groups in Tanzania are calling for stiffer laws to be enacted to punish sexual abuse of children, Amnesty International thinks Tanzania's existing laws, which call for stiff punishment to such offenders, violated human rights, The Express has learnt.

In its recently published report, the international human rights watchdog charges that Tanzania carries out inhuman, cruel and degrading punishments on those accused of sexual abuse.

Citing one example on page 306 of the report, covering 151 counties worldwide for the period January to December 1996, it states that, "In March, 1996, a man was sentenced to 12 strokes of the cane and 34 years' imprisonment for defiling and sodomizing a child." It describes the sentence as inhuman, cruel and degrading.