Santo Domingo province senator, Antonio Taveras Guzman is on a quest to collect a million signatures in favor of Congress passing the Extinction of Domain bill. The bill has stagnated in the congress for years. The bill would strengthen mechanisms to reduce administrative corruption in the Dominican Republic, money laundering and other crimes.
Taveras (Santo Domingo-PRM) announced the start of the campaign “Recover what has been stolen” (Recuperemos lo robado).
Taveras says the law would become an instrument of high legal expertise to fight corruption, and it would facilitate the recovery of stolen public patrimony and discourage politicians to seek public office to enrich themselves illicitly.
Tavares Guzman is the president of the Justice Commission of the Senate. He announced as part of the campaign he would foster meetings with organized groups of the society so that the content of the draft legislation is known and so that the people are aware of the importance of this legislation for the real control of corruption. He seeks the empowerment of the population.
He announced a campaign to collect one million online signatures in support of the bill.
“We need all Dominicans of goodwill, those who feel that they are victims of the looting of the treasury to know that this wealth would have served to have first class education, effective health services for all, decent transportation, food, housing, sanitation,” the legislator emphasized.
He stressed that law-abiding citizens who legally buy and use assets have nothing to fear with the Extinction of Ownership legislation and assured that the legal framework will not be used to affect property that a person has legally obtained or used in good faith.
In a feature in Listin Diario, expert lawyer Olivo Rodríguez Huertas called for limiting the Extinction of Domain bill so that it is used exclusively as an instrument to combat the immense fortunes originated in organized crime, hired assassination, public corruption and private corruption in the field of financial markets, when, as stated in Article 51, letter c) of the Merida Convention against Corruption “the offender cannot be prosecuted by reason of death, flight or absence, or in other appropriate cases.” He is against the violating the constitutional principle of non-retroactivity.
Read more in Spanish:
El Dia
Listin Diario
22 February 2022