Top European court condemns France over failure to protect girls who
reported rape
[April 24, 2025]
BY SAMUEL PETREQUIN
PARIS (AP) — The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) sided Thursday
with three women who said they were raped when they were aged 13, 14 and
16 and argued that French authorities did not do enough to protect them.
The ruling will likely fuel the debate on the inclusion of consent in
the law for sexual offences that was reignited by the drugging-and-rape
trial that riveted France last year. 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
hospitalized in a children’s psychiatric ward on several occasions.
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View of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, eastern
France, on Sept. 27, 2023. (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias, File)
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 moralizing 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 mete 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.”
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