Having sex with a corpse is to become a specific crime in the Netherlands because current laws do not offer enough protection to the dead, justice minister Dilan Yeşilgöz and home affairs minister Hanke Bruins Slot have told MPs in a briefing.

The new offence will also cover making sexually-related photography of the dead and selling body parts, as well as physically assaulting a body, the ministers said.

“It is time to send a clear signal that sexual and other forms of physical desecration are not accepted in our society,” Yeşilgöz said. “This can cause great suffering to the relatives.”

The decision to introduce new legislation follows government-commissioned research which concluded that a corpse had special legal status and should be protected. In current law, a corpse is an “object”, rather than a dead human.

The research project was set up after a majority of MPs voted in favour of a motion to make necrophilia a crime.