National Congress seeks to expedite approval of the Criminal Code

Santo Domingo.- The bicameral commission of the National Congress in charge of studying the draft of the Penal Code met this past Wednesday with the presence of the president of the Senate, Ricardo de los Santos, and the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Alfredo Pacheco, who reported that this commission is preparing to modify its working dynamics to achieve a report on the piece before the end of the current legislature, scheduled for July 26.

Among the agreements reached by the commission is to use as a reference framework the latest version of the bill that was approved by the Senate in July 2024 and, from this, identify the discrepancies that the legislators have, which will be debated in three consecutive sessions on the next Mondays 16, Tuesdays 17 and Wednesdays 18 of July. Based on the progress of this process, they will evaluate how to continue the analysis of the initiative, of which they have about 42 agreed articles out of a total of 419. This meeting was preceded by several meetings in both legislative chambers, with the presence of the spokespersons of the parties with representation, who have articulated both Pacheco and De los Santos in each wing of the Legislative Power, in search of "sensitizing" their other colleagues about what they have called a "joint agenda" to give greater speed to the legislative backlog currently facing the National Congress. Among the projects that are sought to be approved is the Penal Code bill, as well as those of Public Contracting, the law that modifies the Criminal Procedure Code, the Cybersecurity law, the Artificial Intelligence law, the law that establishes the Cooperative Regime, the Sports Law, the Energy Efficiency law, the Amber Alert law and the Independent Candidacies law.

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Also, there are the National Congress's Control and Oversight bills, the Rent law, the School Nutrition law, the law on Illicit Trafficking of Migrants and Trafficking in Persons, the law that creates a single Ministry of Education, the law that merges the Ministries of Finance and Economy, the Solid Waste law, the law on Expression and Dissemination of Thought, the Climate Change law, the Contentious Jurisdiction law, the general law on Disability, the organic bill of the Constitutional Court, the bill on Supervision of Works with more than 10 years of construction and the Ministry of Justice law, among other initiatives.