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Penal Code (Amendment) Act, 2001 (No. 15 of 2001).

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First Region

Kiribati
Criminal and penal law
2001
National
Law, Act

Second Region

This short Act seeks to amend the Penal Code with a view to empower the Court to admit as evidence in court any document whether it is an original or a copy of the original as the case may be in a criminal prosecution of a person who has been charged with larceny or theft of document specified under section 256.
It is also proposed that a person possessing a copy of a document under this section once amended will give rise to an inference that such person has stolen the document unless he displaces the inference by adducing contrary evidence.
Under this section 256 of the Penal Code, it would seem that no offence of theft of a document is committed if the offender steals only a copy of such document in question. However, the advance in modern photocopying technology does not appear to support such distinction between an original document or a copy of the document as a photocopied document in most if not all cases looks just as good as an original document.
Furthermore whether the offender steals an original document or a copy of such document, such theft of the document is still a theft of the same document. It might be the case also that such copy is the only copy available.
Hence the deletion of the word "original" as appears throughout section 256 of the Penal Code (Section 2 of the Act).

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