Australian federal Lawyer-Normal Mark Dreyfus Monday announced that $14.7 million might be devoted to bettering sexual assault legal guidelines throughout the nation. Dreyfus said that the primary focus is on making certain the prison justice system and course of don’t additional hurt sexual assault victims.
The funding might be delivered in two phases. Stage one will see the creation of a Regulation Reform Fee and an Export Advisory Group to discover the problems and supply suggestions, together with elevated efforts to unify sexual assault and consent legal guidelines throughout Australia. Stage Two is ready for 2026 and 2027, throughout which the funding might be used to design and check the effectiveness of a brand new kind of prison trial aimed toward “prevention and early intervention.” Dreyfus didn’t present any info on what precisely these trials would appear like or how they’d differ from present sexual assault trials.
Sexual violence and consent have been areas of great focus lately, significantly within the context of a number of high-profile sexual assault trials in Australia, such because the Lehrmann case and the Porter case. Each the state and federal governments have introduced varied funding and laws modifications. In June 2022, New South Wales introduced new consent legal guidelines that extra clearly outlined consent and gave new instructions for juries in sexual assault trials.
The announcement of this funding follows the federal government’s National Plan to scale back violence towards ladies and youngsters in October 2022, which included funding of $20 million for “extra specialised, trauma-informed authorized providers and coaching for sexual violence response.”
Source / Picture: jurist.org
