Pro-life action conference in Calgary draws more than 100 activists

People demonstrate, some holding Cuban flags, during a protest against the Cuban government at Versailles Restaurant in Miami, on July 12, 2021. – Havana on Monday blamed a US “policy of economic suffocation” for unprecedented protests against Cuba’s communist government as Washington pointed the finger at “decades of repression” in the one-party state. Credit: Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images.

Havana, Cuba, Jul 22, 2021 / 15:19 pm (CNA).

Cuba’s communist government has drafted a law that would equate the role of dissidents’ defense lawyers with that of public officials.

In May, the People’s Supreme Court, Cuba’s highest judicial authority, drew up a series of legislative proposals that it sent to the island’s legislature, the National Assembly of People’s Power, for passage.

Among these proposals is the “Draft Law on Criminal Procedures,” which could equate the role of a defense lawyer for dissidents with that of a “public employee or official,” putting the lawyer at the mercy of pressure and sanctions from the government

A group of Cuban lawyers, who asked to speak with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language news partner, on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the government, warned that this bill “would violate impartiality,” because “the Prosecutor’s Office represents the state, it’s a public functionary. Imagine if the defense lawyer also were.”

The lawyers pointed out that “this is something that for many years they have tried to accomplish, but a way wasn’t found to implement it by changing the law.”

“But now, with a new criminal procedural text, an attempt is being made to introduce it in a very underhanded way,” they said.

The most controversial texts of the bill are found in the fifth special provision, which defines what is an employee and a public official.

Subsections e and f state that public employees and officials are part of state agencies “of a public nature” performing “legislative, executive or judicial functions,” among others.

However, subsection g adds that “public employees or officials are also considered those persons who, in the non-state sector, as well as in foreign entities or public international organizations, exercise positions or functions similar to those described in subsections e and f when the criminal acts derive from their relationship with the state or its institutions.”

The Cuban jurists told ACI Prensa that “although the word ‘lawyer’ is not mentioned, the generality of the expression ‘non-state sector’ is the way to allow this interpretation where the judges don’t enjoy authentic judicial independence.”

“What they’re looking for is a way to exert pressure on lawyers and, when necessary, get them out of the way. That’s how they would do it.”

“And getting them out of the way,” they warned, could mean “taking them out of circulation completely” by finding them guilty of a crime, “which also would result in their expulsion from the National Organization of Collective Law Firms, the only institution of its kind on the island for the provision of legal services to native born persons who are defendants in a criminal case.”

The judges who make up the People’s Supreme Court are elected by the National Assembly of the People’s Power, a one-party legislative body which also elects the country’s president.

Communist rule in Cuba was established soon after the conclusion of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which ousted the authoritarian ruler Fulgencio Batista.

Protests took place across Cuba July 11-12. Protesters cited concerns about inflation, shortages of food and medicine, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some protesters were beaten, and at least 100 were arrested.

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Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Jan 11, 2021 / 04:47 pm (CNA).- The Dominican bishops’ conference issued a statement Sunday rejecting a proposal to decriminalize abortion under certain conditions in a newly revised penal code being debated in the Dominican Congress.

“Life is the first civil right that is mentioned in our Constitution in its art. 37, which reads: ‘The right to life is inviolable from conception to death.’ Life is a right prior to all legislation. Without life there are no possibilities to enjoy any other right,” the bishops said in the Jan. 10 statement.

Despite the fact that the nation’s constitution rejects the possibility of legalizing abortion, radical feminist activists have been trying to de facto legalize it via a “decriminalization” using the penal code.

“According to our own Constitution, the State cannot apply the death penalty even to the worst offenders, since it says: ‘The death penalty may not be established, pronounced or applied, in any case.’ So, how to accept that in our country abortion is consecrated, in the so-called three causes, in which innocent creatures are killed, the nasciturus (the unborn child)?” the bishops’ document says.

In December 2020, the president of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, told the left-leaning Spanish newspaper El País that  “I disagree, as does the majority of the population, not only in the Dominican Republic but also in the world, with free abortion, but I do think that there must be grounds that allow the interruption of the pregnancy. That has been the official position of our party.”

The Dominican congress, with the president’s support, is debating legalizing abortion in the cases pertaining to “the health of the mother,” rape, and “severe fetal malformation.”

According to the bishops’ conference, “Incorporating abortion into our legislation, in any circumstance, is a flagrant constitutional violation, and a blow to the social and democratic state of law. Approving the so-called three grounds would be a serious violation of the right to life that could only be based on a wrong interpretation of the Constitution.”

“We are shocked to know that in our society there are those who think that sacrificing innocent children under euphemistic names such as ‘a decision about one’s own body,’ ‘women’s empowerment’ or ‘sexual and reproductive rights’ can be seen as part of authentic progress.”

Regarding “therapeutic abortion,” the bishops explain that “Medical ethics indicates that in the case of complications in a pregnancy, efforts should be made to save mother and child and never see the premeditated death of one of them as an easy way out, as established in the official protocols of the Ministry of Public Health, which have been used in public hospitals in our country for many years.”

“Let us promote the approval of a Penal Code in accordance with our Constitution, one that shows to the world that Dominicans love life, and that motherhood is one of the great treasures that the Dominican woman and our Nation have.”

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ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 24, 2023 / 12:30 pm (CNA).
Father Alberto Reyes, a priest of the Archdiocese of Camagüey in Cuba, recently stated that members of the Church who denounce the injustices that occur in the country get… […]