By Michael Ha
Staff Reporter
The Cabinet Tuesday adopted an amendment toughening up the law against child sex offenders.
Under the amended law, those convicted of molestation and murder of minors under the age of 13 would be given a death sentence or a life sentence.
Those convicted of molestation would be sentenced to at least seven years in jail, while those convicted of sexual harassment would receive a minimum of three years in jail or up to 30 million won ($30,000) in fines.
The government has been working on measures to toughen up the law against sex offenders following a highly publicized case involving the murders of two schoolchildren.
The suspect in the gruesome case was caught in March and confessed to kidnapping and murdering two elementary school children who went missing last December.
The National Assembly also passed a bill earlier that would require convicted sex offenders to wear an anklet embedded with a Global Positioning System (GPS) device for at least five years. The monitoring requirement is scheduled to go into effect beginning October.
Rep. Park Sei-hwan of the Grand National Party, who had drafted the GPS monitoring bill last year, had said: ``Our society has witnessed a drastically increased number of child sex crime cases, as seen in the case involving two elementary school children. It's time to take tougher measures to prevent these tragic incidents from recurring in the future."
The Ministry of Justice has also said it is looking at compiling a DNA database of convicted sex offenders but that initiative has been facing criticism from civil rights groups on the grounds that it breaches individual rights.
Other countries also have been tightening up their policies in recent years in monitoring convicted sex offenders.
In the United States, for example, the Justice Department coordinates the National Sex Offender Public Registry web site that enables every citizen to search the latest information from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for the identity and location of known sex offenders.
Additionally, more than 20 states use GPS monitoring system to track convicted sex offenders.