A woman, who was blamed by French courts for her divorce because she no longer had sex with her husband, has won an appeal in Europe’s top human rights court, the court said on Thursday, reigniting a debate in France over women’s rights.
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[Lawyer, Lilia Mhissen] “This decision marks the abolition of the marital duty and the archaic, canonical vision of the family,” she said in a statement. “Courts will finally stop interpreting French law through the lens of canon law and imposing on women the obligation to have sexual relations within marriage.”
This is more of a technical matter, but how does this European Court of Human Rights verdict get incorporated into law?
The US Supreme Court’s verdicts get implemented rather easily because the US uses common law where judicial rulings become law and lawyers get a wide berth to interpret laws. In contrast, France has a civil law system, where judges are supposed to interpret the law rather narrowly and verdicts aren’t supposed to have any legal weight.
There is a pyramidal conception of rules in the france legal system, something like local regulation < regional regulation < decree < law < international law < constitution. So judgements in courts created by international laws are technically stronger than national judgments.
Also, the decisions of judges have no imperative power, but they are used by judges to solve future cases, and have a de facto big impact on the interpretation of laws. It’s called jurisprudence : to say it quickly, when a judge does not know how to handle an unclear law, they look at what other judges said before.