Some 800 offenders are listed in the database.
“The right to protect our children is above the anonymity of criminals,” said Justice Minister and Attorney General Zbigniew Ziobro, according to a report by the news agency dpa. In addition, Ziobro’s ministry has created another register with the names of people convicted of child pornography.
However, this database will only be accessible to representatives of authorities. For example, school directors should be allowed to check applicants for criminal record before hiring them. If such an examination fails, fines and imprisonment await offenders.
Ziobro said reforms were needed because Poland’s criminal code has some of the laxest punishments for sex offenders in the European Union.
The announcement came after a brutal gang rape of a Polish 26-year-old woman on a beach in Rimini, Italy, in 2017 and an assault on her husband by four people of Middle Eastern and African descent, three of them minors.
Ziobro on Thursday said the alleged attackers faced harsher penalties in Italy than in Poland if found guilty.
The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights claims that “a public registry is not an effective instrument against the risk of sex crimes.” The HFHR is not against introducing into Polish law a mechanism that would register sex offenders, but does not want this information open to public scrutiny.
“We believe that access to such database should be limited to a narrow group of users,” says the HFHR’s secretary of the board Piotr Kładoczny. In the foundation’s opinion, the idea of a public registry of sex offenders should be abandoned.
“A publicly accessible registry is not an effective measure for reducing risk of sex crime and its introduction would cause unnecessary social concern as well as lead to a number of negative consequences for the families of sex offenders,” says Kładoczny.
Another institution, the Polish Sexology Association (PTS), also expressed its protest against the public registry of sex offenders.
In its statement, PTS emphasized that, among other issues, the existence of such a registry would reduce opportunities for conducting therapy for sex offenders as it makes it impossible for them to return to society.