The increase in sanctions comes as Ministry of Justice data for the past 10 years show the number of prosecutions have halved since 2010, with 17,586 motorists charged in 2015 compared with 35,255 in 2010.
Though the law has been around for a long while, the number of prosecutions has risen and penalties have grown more severe since the military took power.
Since then, however, the number of prosecutions for rape has gone down while funding for victims is drying up, according to Congolese organizations working on the ground.
The number of prosecutions for "honour" crimes in the year to April 2015 was 225.
The number of prosecutions for hate crimes against disabled people has surged by 41.3percentnt in the last year.
The officials said Mr. Ashcroft had also sought to step up prosecutions of would-be owners who lied on background checks, and the number of prosecutions for false statements rose 8percentt last year, officials said.
This is certainly true in Indiana, where legislators said they were aiming to stop "voter impersonation," which was already a crime in the state; in the entire history of Indiana, the number of prosecutions for this offense has been zero.
Increasing the number of prosecutions for lying on background-check forms is an effort that the administration can undertake largely on its own, in part by pressing federal prosecutors to pursue such cases.
The regional breakdown, illustrated below in a map by Statista UK for The Independent, shows that despite the number of prosecutions being roughly proportionate to population size - with London seeing 810 prosecutions in 2014/15 - the percentage of rape reports resulting in a conviction varied hugely from place to place.
