The reason and understanding of a people who will know how to judge the content of the new Family Code that will be submitted to referendum next 25th, after a long process of popular consultation where each individual with legal rights to vote could give their opinion, suggest modifications, substitutions or omissions of aspects contemplated in the draft bill, will triumph.
Among the modifications of the legal proposal are parental authority, progressive autonomy, egalitarian marriage, surrogate motherhood and the responsibility of children with elderly parents.
All citizens over 16 years of age may attend the voting and must answer with (YES) or (NO) to the question: Do you agree with the Family Code?
As established by the National Assembly of People’s Power, the text will be approved if it receives a majority vote in favor of the valid ballots.
Cuba’s National Assembly informed this Friday that the population will exercise its right to vote next September 25 in the popular referendum on the Family Code, a law dating back to 1975.
An inclusive family code
On that date, citizens in the national territory will cast their vote to support or reject the new legal proposal, approved this day by the deputies, although on September 18 Cubans who are abroad will be able to vote in the respective referendums.
The Family Code revolutionizes some concepts such as parental responsibility and positive upbringing, guaranteeing progressive autonomy and the recognition of children as subjects of rights.
This norm would guarantee other rights, already protected in the Cuban Constitution, such as marriage between persons of the same gender, and the legal recognition of other types of families that already exist in Cuban society.
The legislation makes caregivers visible for the first time in Cuba and provides them with protection. Likewise, it protects girls and adolescents by eliminating from its articles the possibility of marrying before the age of 18.
The inclusion of the right to sexual and reproductive health is another of the rights recognized in the Code, and that “there is an intentional treatment of discrimination and violence in the family space, with palpable legal effects in every circumstance in which it occurs and the possibility of its denunciation by any person who has knowledge of these facts”.
This new code includes rights previously excluded and which deprived many citizens of opportunities and a secure legality in terms of the approach, treatment and conception of important aspects related to the different types of families that may exist -and in fact do exist- in Cuban society.
