All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
France is to enshrine in law the end of so-called “conjugal rights” – the notion that marriage means a duty to have sex.
A bill approved on Wednesday in the National Assembly adds a clause to the country’s civil code to make clear that “community of living” does not create an “obligation for sexual relations”.
The proposed law also makes it impossible to use lack of sexual relations as an argument in fault-based divorce.
Though unlikely to have a major impact in the courts, supporters hope the law will help deter marital rape.
[J]udges in modern divorce suits have, from time to time, given a broad interpretation to the concept of “community of living” to include sexual relations.
In a famous case in 2019 a woman was found to have withheld sex from her husband for several years, and he was then granted a “fault-based” divorce implying guilt on her part.
But the woman then took her case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which last year condemned France for allowing refusal of sex to be grounds for a fault-based divorce.
The Mazan trial of 2024 – where a drugged and unconscious Gisèle Pelicot was repeatedly raped by men invited by her husband – is seen as emblematic. Several defendants said they assumed her consent because of what her husband had told them.
In France, as in most other countries, marital rape is now enshrined in law, where prior to 1990 men could argue that marriage implied consent.
Since November last year the legal definition of rape in France has also been expanded to include the notion of non-consent.
Previously, rape was defined as a sexual act carried out with “violence, constraint, threat or surprise”. Now it is any act where there is no “informed, specific, anterior and revocable” consent. Silence or an absence of reaction do not imply consent, the law says.
Source: France moves to abolish concept of marital duty to have sex