The couple had been together for some three decades before they divorced. She blamed his work for taking a toll on their marriage. But in 2019, a French court ruled that she was solely to blame for the split, after she refused to have sex with him.
Europe’s top human rights court on Thursday condemned that ruling, saying that the French court’s decision had violated the woman’s right to private life and autonomy, which included her sexual life. The decision was seen as a milestone by women’s rights activists who have long raised concerns about France’s marital laws.
The 2019 decision by the Versailles Court of Appeals said that the woman, identified only as H.W. in court documents, was at fault in the divorce after stopping “intimate relations” with her husband. Her refusal for years to be intimate with her husband, that court said, was a “serious and repeated violation” of her marital duties.
But the European Court of Human Rights, saying that governments had an obligation to combat domestic and sexual violence, ruled on Thursday that “the very existence of such a marital obligation is contrary both to sexual freedom and to the right to control one’s body.”
It added, “The court cannot accept, as the government suggests, that consent to marriage implies consent to future sexual relations.”
It was a symbolic victory for the woman, who had argued that she should not have been found at fault in the divorce. Women’s rights groups called the decision a fundamental step to address sexual violence and other forms of abuse against women in relationships.
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