sexual health and human rights in the african region - The ICHRP

and female victims. Sixteen years is now the age of consent to sexual intercourse
for both boys and girls.
3.4 Criminalization of Incest
[33] State regulation of sexual activities in the African region, includes the regulation
of incest. All African countries have laws that prohibit incest. Although the laws
vary in their scope in terms of the persons they include in the prohibited
category of relationships, they generally cast a wide rather than restricted net of
prohibited relationships. The laws may conflate incest with prohibited
relationships in marriage. An example is article 621 of the Eritrean Penal Code
which prohibits consensual sex between persons who by law are not allowed to
marry.
[34] The prohibited relationships for incest generally net in persons that are related in
consanguinity, affinity and adoption. Section 20(1) of the Kenyan Sexual
Offences Act is an example. It says:
20. (1) Any male person who commits an indecent act or an act which causes penetration with a
female person who is to his knowledge his daughter, granddaughter, sister, mother, niece, aunt
or grandmother is guilty of an offence termed incest and is liable to imprisonment for a term of
not less than ten years:
The section applies in a like manner to a female perpetrator. Under the Kenyan
Sexual Offences Act a ‘brother and sister’ includes half brother, half sister and
adoptive brother and adoptive sister and a father includes a half father and an
uncle of the first degree and a mother includes a half mother and an aunt of the
first degree whether through lawful wedlock or not. 410 The provisions of
Zimbabwean law are even wider in terms of the prohibited degree of
relationships. Under the Zimbabwean Criminal Law (Codification and Reform)
Act of 2004, prohibited relationships include second degree relationships. 411
3.5 Criminalization of HIV Transmission
[35] The domestic principles of criminal law in all the African countries that have
been surveyed that were extant when the HIV epidemic first manifested have,
with appropriate modification, always been amenable to punishing deliberate
transmission of HIV by one person to another either through the interpretation
and application of common law or the penal code. A person who deliberately
causes another to contract a serious diseases through the transmission of HIV can
conceivably be prosecuted in all the surveyed countries for attempted murder,
410 Section 22 of the Sexual Offences Act of 2006 (Kenya).
411 Section 75 of the Zimbabwean Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act of 2004.
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