Cambodia passes adultery law

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Cambodia's parliament passed a law Friday which could send adulterers to jail for up to a year.

The vote prompted a walkout by opposition lawmakers who said the law carried echoes of the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban in a country which should be tackling poverty and corruption instead of legislating about morality.

But the government argued the law would help reduce pervasive corruption by removing the temptation for officials to steal from state coffers to maintain mistresses as well as halting what it called a decline in morality.

"This law is also aimed at reducing corruption, because when government officials have more women, they seek more financial sources to support their girls," National Assembly Chairman Heng Samrin said.

Sam Rainsy, chief of his eponymous opposition party, was not impressed.

"The government wants to distract the public from the important issues of poverty and the culture of impunity," he said of a country where 35 percent of the 14 million population live on less than $1 a day and the powerful rarely face justice.

Many married Cambodian men keep mistresses if they can afford them and the government argued that making adultery a criminal offence would help shore up the family.

Some wives resent the unfaithfulness of their husbands to the point of violence.

In the last 7 years, at least 108 cases were reported of women being attacked by acid, some left horrendously scarred, usually by an outraged wife, the Licadho human rights group says

Few such cases made it to court, most being settled by compensation.

The opposition argued that a law on adultery smacked too much of rigidly authoritarian regimes like the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban for a country still recovering from the Pol Pot years in which 1.7 million people were killed or died of overwork and starvation.

"There are only a couple of countries in the world which prosecuted personal immorality based on their sacred texts such as the ousted Taliban regime," opposition MP Eng Chhay Eang said in the debate.

"They forced people to follow their tradition which cannot be accepted. So did Pol Pot's regime. They murdered people who had love affairs," he added.

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