Criminal

Femicide, rejection of the relationship will be decisive

Rapporteurs' amendment to the government text to clarify the crime. Life imprisonment for those who kill in reaction to the interruption of an emotional relationship

by Giovanni Negri

26 June 2025

3' min read

Key points

The critical issues reported by the ANM
Application of precautionary measures

3' min read

It changes the the crime of feminicide. With the aim of making it a little less elusive, the rapporteurs of the bill, the chairwoman of the Senate Justice Committee Giulia Bongiorno, of the League, and Senator Susanna Campione, of Fratelli d'Italia, have tabled an amendment that rewrites the conduct punishable by the maximum sanction of the penal system, life imprisonment.

As a result of the proposed amendment, the murder of a woman is punishable 'when the act is committed as an act of discrimination or hate towards the offended person because she is a woman or is the consequence of refusal to establish or maintain an emotional relationship or to be subjected to a condition of subjection or in any case a limitation of her individual freedoms, imposed or demanded because of her status as a woman'.

The reference to the exercise of rights and the expression of personality disappears. A formulation that tries to respond to at least some of the criticism that rained down on the text approved in March by the Council of Ministers.

Central to the perplexities expressed so far is the point of the excessive vagueness of the crime. With the ANM, for example, which has emphasised how the legislative operation seems to have wanted to include, as pivotal elements of the criminally relevant conduct, the cultural, sociological and criminological reasons that justify the introduction of an autonomous case of feminicide, 'which, however, are ill-suited to being used as typifying elements of a criminal case'.

The critical issues reported by the ANM

The draft law, the Magistrates' Association observed, thus seems to confuse the aim of incrimination, which is noble and criminologically grounded, with the technique of incrimination, which is characterised by prejudicial, vague elements susceptible to different interpretations, 'without succeeding in delineating an immediately graspable legal type'.

The danger, the magistrates recalled, was that of a conceptual and evidentiary shift focused on the motives of the action and therefore on the perpetrator of the crime, with a trial in which the public prosecutor would likely be called upon to investigate the personality of the perpetrator before the fact itself, in the absence of legislative indications on elements capable of specifying, in terms of even probability, the types of acts of discrimination or hatred, or even forms of denial of fundamental freedoms.

No intervention, at least for now, by the rapporteurs on other critical fronts. Starting with the sanctioning treatment, at the risk of instituting, by specifying the offended person, a violation of the principle of equality, with a different consideration of the seriousness of the crime for the fact that it affects the life of a woman, rather than that of a man.

Application of precautionary measures

Another problem was the introduction of the obligation to apply the only precautionary measure when the investigations concern the crimes of family abuse, stalking, aggravated personal injury and attempted murder, committed within the family or in the context of emotional relationships. And from an organisational point of view, the provision of personal hearing, which cannot be delegated to the judicial police, of the offended person by the public prosecutor (risk of paralysis of small and medium-sized public prosecutors' offices) and the extension of the collegial jurisdiction of the judges is problematic.