Offenders to face castration

  • 2011-05-18
  • From wire reports

TALLINN -  The Estonian Justice Ministry will start preparing a bill that will enable chemical castration of sexual criminals, in order to expand the possibilities of treatment of sexual criminals by including chemical castration as a part of the Estonian punitive system, reports National Broadcasting. “International experience has shown that complex treatment, a part of which is, if put in popular scientific terms, chemical castration of sexual criminals, yields good results for preventing future crimes by such criminals. Thus, Estonia should consider it and use it if need be,” said Justice Minister Kristen Michal in a press release.

The preparations for compiling the bill were launched last year when specialists from different ministries and institutions studied international experiences of implementing such practices. As the next step, a treatment plan was commissioned from Social Ministry experts and that was completed this spring.
The next step is updating the legal framework to use treatment with medicines, combined with psycho-social intervention, as part of the Estonian punitive system. Agreement of the convict is a prerequisite of treatment, said the ministry’s criminal politics department adviser Kaire Tamm.

Tamm said that the target group of the treatments is mainly persons who have committed sexual crimes against children and whose new crime risk is medium or high and cannot be reduced without medicines.

In 2010, 275 sexual crimes were registered, nearly three quarters of which were against minors.