Cambodia Passes Adultery Law - Legislators Walk Out

The Cambodian parliament has passed a law which could send convicted adulterers to jail for up to a year. Lawmakers opposed to the measure immediately stormed out.

The vote prompted a walkout by opposition lawmakers who said the law carried echoes of the Khmer Rouge and the Taliban in a country which should be tackling poverty and corruption instead of legislating about morality.

But the government argued the law would help reduce pervasive corruption by removing the temptation for officials to steal from state coffers to maintain mistresses as well as halting what it called a decline in morality.

"This law is also aimed at reducing corruption, because when government officials have more women, they seek more financial sources to support their girls," National Assembly Chairman Heng Samrin said.

The walkout of lawmakers came as a complete surprise since it was the entire French parliament that did the walking.

Sexus Politicus, published on Thursday, reveals decades of philandering, adultery and seduction at the heart of the French state, with politicians of all colours apparently sharing the same passion for extra-marital sex.

According to the book, President Jacques Chirac and his predecessors Francois Mitterrand and Valery Giscard D'Estaing have juggled the fate of France, their families and a bevy of lovers with great ease, helped partly by an acquiescent media.

While there is little in the 390-page book that will surprise France's chattering classes, it nonetheless rips up the long-standing rule that what politicians do between the sheets should remain strictly off the record.

"All these politicians present themselves as clean-living individuals, but at the same time almost all French male politicians are compulsive womanisers," said Christophe Dubois, who co-authored the book with Christophe Deloire.

"This is an area that no one has explored before. It was a taboo. We've broken this taboo with the complicity of the politicians," he told Reuters, explaining how many of the book's targets willingly discussed their amorous exploits.

(I just knew I could tie those two stories together somehow!)