It's been 13 years since a French couple sought to end their marriage, but their legal case has just now wrapped up—with the wife finally vindicated by Europe's highest human-rights court of being the sole cause of their marital demise. The BBC reports that the 69-year-old Frenchwoman and mother of four, known simply in court records as "Ms. HW," had stopped having sex with her husband of two decades in 2004, two years after she says he'd started physically and verbally abusing her. In 2012, HW finally petitioned for the divorce they both wanted, but when it was granted to them by a French court, she was the only one deemed "at fault" in the court's paperwork, per the Guardian.
HW objected to that, and after losing appeals in France that went all the way up to the Court of Cassation, the nation's highest court, the woman then brought her case to the European Court of Human Rights in 2021. The ECHR found that "the very existence of such a marital obligation ran counter to sexual freedom, [and] the right to bodily autonomy," and that France had violated her right to respect for privacy and family life, the ECHR said in a statement. "The applicant's husband could have petitioned for divorce, submitting the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage as the principal ground"—not placed the blame squarely on his estranged spouse.
Nicolas Hervieu, a law professor at the Sciences Po research university in Paris, tells Reuters that the ECHR's ruling was "humiliating for France but salutary for the reminder of the principles of sexual liberty and of protection for victims of sexual violence." HW, meanwhile, who was supported by activists for women's rights, said in a statement that "it is now imperative that France, like other European countries, such as Portugal or Spain, take concrete measures to eradicate this rape culture and promote a true culture of consent and mutual respect." (More divorce stories.)
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