With his signature on Sunday, 3 August 2025, President Luis Abinader enacted the Penal Code. The new Penal Code will go into effect in a year’s time, giving still many months for consultations and possible future amendments by Congress.
The ruling party majority Modern Revolutionary Party senate and chamber of deputies had delivered the bill to the President after a marathonic session that ended at 3am on Friday, 5 August 2025. It was the best they could do after years of expensive outings to resorts for debates and long discussions in the Centro de los Heroes headquarters, and millions spent on advisors. Regardless, the bill has been criticized as a setback instead of the modern penal code the country wanted.
Generalized dissatisfaction with what the PRM-majority Congress had delivered as its version for a modernized Penal Code had many asking President Luis Abinader to veto the bill. The bill was rejected for its clauses regarding women’s and children’s rights, corruption and much more.
The new Penal Code describes some 70 new crimes, contains 64 recent amendments the Chamber of Deputies incorporated after receiving it from the Senate and looking into recommendations made by the Attorney General of the Republic and the Public Defender’s Office.
Legislators told media representatives that this is truly the first “really Dominican” penal code, since the previous documents were based upon the Napoleonic Code of 1810 and was 141 years old.
During the final voting on the legislation in the Senate, all but Antonio Tavares (PRM-Santo Domingo) voted yes.
The legislators said they had modernized the centuries old code by enabling accumulating prison terms. The new code has special references to crimes such as killing-for-hire, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, feminicide and other crimes related to gender, and chemical assaults. Abortion was a key issue, and the new code puts the onus on the doctors who must present the excuse for carrying out an abortion. Even such trans-lingual crimes such as bullying are written into the bill.
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Penal Code
4 August 2025