France has taken steps to toughen punishment for rape and sexual misconduct, including setting 15 as the age of consent, but the notion of consent has yet to be introduced into the legal definition of rape.
In all three cases examined by the ECHR, the applicants argued that their age and their vulnerability at the time should have been better considered.
The ECHR ruled that the people in charge of investigating the alleged crimes and French courts did not do enough to protect the women who said they were raped.
In two of the cases, the Court said that criminal proceedings were not handled quickly or with due care.
The court condemned France for violating articles of the European Convention on Human Rights that prohibit torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as the women’s right to respect for their private lives.
“The Court considered that the domestic courts had not properly assessed the impact of all the circumstances surrounding the events; nor had they taken sufficient account, in evaluating whether the applicants had been capable of understanding and of giving consent, of the particularly vulnerable situations in which they had found themselves, particularly in view of their ages,” the ECHR said.
The court also noted the “lack of promptness and diligence in the conduct of the criminal proceedings” in two of the three cases.
The first concerned a teenager who complained that she had been raped in 2009 by two 21-year-old men who were firefighters stationed in barracks near her home.
The girl described herself as psychologically fragile and bullied at school, which had led to her taking medication and being hospitalised in a children’s psychiatric ward on several occasions.
She stated that she had sexual relations with one of the firefighters on several occasions. She added that her contact details had subsequently been “circulated” among other firefighters at several fire stations, who had contacted her by text or Facebook.
A second plaintiff reported being raped by two men aged 21 and 29 when she was 14. The third woman reported being raped at the age of 16 by an 18-year-old man at her home after a party.
In the case of the girl who said she was assaulted by firefighters, the court also found that French authorities failed “to protect the applicant’s dignity, by permitting the use of moralising and guilt-inducing statements, which propagated gender stereotypes and were capable of impairing victims’ confidence in the justice system”.
The court said that it was not asked to decide if the people who were accused of committing the crimes were guilty, and that its findings cannot be seen as an opinion on the guilt of the accused in the respective cases.
The way rapes are defined and prosecuted in criminal law still varies widely across Europe. Although some countries use consent-based definitions, many others still require the use of force, or threat, to met out punishment.
French law considers that a rape can be considered to have occurred when “an act of sexual penetration or an oral-genital act is committed on a person, with violence, coercion, threat or surprise”. (AP) PY PY
