A top European court on Thursday, April 24, condemned France for failing to protect the rights of three teenagers who reported rape. The European Court of Human Rights found that the French legal system did not properly assess the victims' capacity to give their consent in the "particularly vulnerable situations in which they had found themselves," it said.
"In all three applications, 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," the court said.
In one of the cases, a girl accused several firefighters of rape when she was under 15. A second victim reported two men in their 20s raped her when she was 14, while the third applicant reported that an 18-year-old raped her at her home when she was 16. None of the attackers were held to account.
"Consent had to reflect a free willingness to engage in sexual relations at a given moment and in the specific circumstances," said the court. "The French state had failed to fulfil its duty to apply, in practice, a criminal-law system capable of punishing non-consensual sexual acts."