“A Bad Joke”: Strasbourg Condemns Italy over a Prosecutor’s Remarks

STRASBOURG - A woman has a knife held to her throat, in front of her mother and cousin, while television reports on femicides are playing. To an Italian public prosecutor, that was “clearly a bad joke”. Two children are beaten with a belt, leaving a mark on one child’s arm. To the same prosecutor, these were “mere disciplinary measures” which did not exceed the father’s right to exercise parental authority. Then there are the rapes reported by a woman, committed in the bed where her younger daughter also slept. Here the prosecutor goes further still: it was difficult to prove that the husband had been aware that his wife had not consented because, in his words, “it [was] normal for men to have to overcome a minimum level of resistance that every woman tend [ed] to display when she [was] tired from daily life and a man [made] a sexual advance”. This is not the kind of thing overheard in a pub. It is the substance of a request to discontinue criminal proceedings filed on 5 November 2021 …