The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that France failed to protect the rights of three teenage girls who reported being raped, as the country debates changing how the crime of rape is defined.
In its ruling, delivered on Thursday, the ECHR found that "the investigating authorities and the domestic courts had failed to protect the applicants, who had complained of acts of rape and had been aged only 13, 14 and 16 at the relevant dates, in an adequate manner".
French courts had not "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," the court added.
Rulings by the court, which sits in Strasbourg, are binding.
Suspended sentences in France
In one of the cases, a girl accused several firefighters of raping her when she was under 15.
The victim – known in the French press as "Julie" – is now 80-percent disabled after several suicide attempts.
Top French court to decide if sexual assault by firemen on 13-year-old was rape
A second victim accused two men aged 21 and 29 of raping her when she was 14, while the third applicant reported that an 18-year-old raped her at her home when she was 16.
Following a long legal battle, a French court in November last year handed two of the firefighters suspended sentences over the rapes in the first case.
That ruling came after the victim's family filed an application with the ECHR.
At the time, Julie's mother Corinne Leriche said she was "devastated".
Reacting to Thursday's ruling, Leriche said: "Today, the ECHR severely condemned France for its failure to act in the case of Julie, who was raped by 20 Paris firefighters. We thank all those who supported Julie in her formidable fight. Let this decision be the last."
In the two other cases, the defendants had been acquitted and proceedings dropped respectively at the time of the application to the ECHR.
In all three cases, "the French state had failed to fulfil its duty to apply, in practice, a criminal law system capable of punishing non-consensual sexual acts," the ECHR said.
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Defining rape
France is considering a bill to include a clear reference to lack of consent in its definition of rape.
Supporters of the bill say this will enable the law to better hold perpetrators to account, but opponents say they fear the change will lead investigators to focus excessively on the victim's behaviour.
French bill seeks to close consent loopholes in sexual assault law
Consent-based rape laws already exist in several European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
The ECHR's ruling comes after several high-profile sexual assault cases in France that have sparked widespread discussion about consent.
In December, a French court found 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot guilty of drugging his then-wife Gisele for almost a decade so strangers he recruited online could rape her in her own bed.
(with newswires)
