News item | 13-06-2023 | 12:15
Sexual conduct with deceased persons will be punishable. Current law offers insufficient protection against criminally degrading behavior and the legal framework is therefore being amended. This mainly concerns an independent criminalization of the physical damage to a corpse, necrophilia and making images of a sexual nature of a deceased body. This is what the Ministers of Justice and Security Yeşilgöz-Zegerius and Bruins Slot of the Interior and Kingdom Relations write in a letter to the House of Representatives.
Minister Yesilgöz-Zegerius:
“I think we should send a clear signal that sexual behavior and other very drastic forms of (physical) desecration are not accepted in our society. The suffering that can be caused to the next of kin is great.”
At the request of the then Minister of Justice and Security, the Scientific Research and Documentation Center (WODC) conducted research into the criminalization of desecration of a corpse. This concerns, for example, the removal and/or concealment of a corpse to conceal the cause of death, physical damage to a corpse; performing sexual acts with a corpse (necrophilia), buying or selling (parts of) a corpse or making images or taking fingerprints of a corpse. The researchers come to the conclusion that the deceased body has a special legal status and deserves protection. Although legal solutions have been found to prosecute corpse desecration, the minister, like the investigators, is of the opinion that a criminal case based on Article 350 of the Penal Code is not appropriate to the suffering inflicted and the respect that the deceased body deserves . Article 350 states that the destruction, damage and rendering unusable of a property that belongs to another is punishable.
In January this year, the House of Representatives asked the government to include necrophilia as a crime in the Penal Code and to make physical damage to a corpse an independent offense.