By&nbspEuronews

Published on
13/11/2025 – 17:00 GMT+1

Italy’s Chamber of Deputies Justice Commission has approved an amendment to the sexual violence bill to include mandatory consent, in a shift from previous law that focused on physical coercion or threats.

The amendment, presented by Michela Di Biase of the Democratic Party (PD) and Carolina Varchi of Brothers of Italy (FdI), was backed directly by party leaders Elly Schlein and Giorgia Meloni following contacts in recent days, according to parliamentary sources.

“This is an important step forward for the Italian penal code,” Di Biase said during commission proceedings.

“This new text represents a great cultural change, because too often we have witnessed women being forced to justify themselves even in the face of the violence they have suffered. Sex without consent is rape,” she explained.

The new text states that anyone who commits or induces sexual acts without the free and current consent of the other person will face six to 12 years imprisonment.

Consent is defined as a “free, conscious and unequivocal manifestation of the person’s willingness to participate in the sexual act” valid for the entire duration of the act and revocable at any time.

Consent obtained by coercion, abuse of authority, threat, deception or by taking advantage of a condition of physical or mental vulnerability is not valid under the amendment.

The change updates Article 609-bis of the Criminal Code, which was introduced by Law No 66 of 1996 and moved sexual violence from the sphere of public morality to crimes against the person.

Law No 69/2019, known as the Code Red, raised penalties from six to 12 years and introduced specific aggravating circumstances.

The definition aligns with the Istanbul Convention and jurisprudence from Italy’s Supreme Court, which has recognised sexual violence even in the absence of physical resistance.

The amendment is scheduled to be passed to the Chamber of Deputies next Monday before moving to the Senate.

Multiple documents featuring some of the worst Nazi war criminals were released and declassified earlier this year by Argentine President Javier Milei. The more than 1,850 documents comprise thousands of pages detailing the South American country’s efforts to track and verify the whereabouts of thousands of Nazis who fled Europe after World War II.

The catalyst for the effort came from the Senate Judiciary Committee and its Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who was credited by the Simon Wiesenthal Center for his efforts in getting Milei to release the documents. 

Most of the materials relate to investigations carried out between the late 1950s and the 1980s and were digitized and made available on the nation’s General Archive website, along with secret, declassified presidential decrees from 1957 to 2005. 

The original batch of documents released online is divided into seven large files roughly centered around the main Nazi criminals covered in them. There are multiple documents related to Adolf Eichmann, the engineer of the “Final Solution,” the plan for the extermination of European Jewry. He lived under the name Ricardo Klement around Buenos Aires until being captured by Mossad agents on Argentine soil and taken in a secret operation to stand trial in Jerusalem in 1960.

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Eichmann’s case features prominently in the files and there is contradicting evidence that the leftist, populist government of Juan Perón not only knew Eichmann was in the country but also made efforts to protect him.

Multiple documents also exist detailing the lives of Josef Mengele, the “angel of death” doctor from Auschwitz-Birkenau camps who lived in Argentina and escaped to Paraguay and Brazil, where he died in 1979.

Documents detailing the hunt for Martin Bormann, Hitler’s lieutenant and right-hand man, as well as Croatian murderer, Ante Pavelic, deputy führer and defector Rudolf Hess and the so-called “butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie, received special attention in the files.

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According to Harley Lippman, a member of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad and a board member of the European Jewish Association, the relevance of the release of the Argentinian documents cannot be understated.

“There are numerous questions that these documents can bring light to why a sophisticated society, far from the plagues of European antisemitism such as Argentina’s, agreed to hide Nazi criminals and their secrets for so long. What happened to the U-boats loaded with Nazi gold brought to the country and given to the authorities?” he asked.

“On the one hand, it is shameful that Argentina kept these documents a secret for so long, but on the other hand, we also need to acknowledge the enormous efforts being made by this government to make these documents public. While the historical significance is important, this is more important for Argentinians to be able to confront their demons as a society than for Jews,” Lippman said.

Adding to the large reveal, in May, while the Supreme Court of Argentina was undergoing renovations and transferring document collections to museums, a forgotten trove of 83 boxes of Nazi documents was discovered almost untouched in the basement of the institution. Upon inspection, the crates revealed documents intercepted by Argentine customs in 1941, sent from the German Third Reich Embassy in Tokyo, Japan, to Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, aboard the Japanese steamer Nan-a-Maru.

The documents had been sent as personal effects of embassy personnel but were intercepted under orders of the country’s minister for foreign affairs in order not to undermine Argentina’s neutral position in the war. The shipment became the subject of a probe by a commission investigating “anti-Argentine activities”, which led to the seizure and possession of the crates by the country’s supreme court, where they remained for nearly 84 years.

The finding of the boxes revealed multiple materials intended to propagate and consolidate the Third Reich’s and Hitler’s ideologies in Argentina and South America, possibly in an effort to bring neutral countries under the auspices of Germany.

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After opening the boxes along with prominent members of the country’s Jewish community, the court issued a statement saying that “given the historical relevance of the find and the potential crucial information it could contain to clarify events related to the Holocaust,” an exhaustive survey of all the material was ordered.

The contents of the crates have not yet been made public, but Milei’s office has said that once all the documents have been digitized, they will also be declassified and made available.

Argentina’s Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, Guillermo Francos, has previously said Milei gave [such] order “because there is no reason to continue withholding that information, and it is no longer in the interest of the Republic of Argentina to keep such secrets”.

“Jews after World War II lived a golden age of about 80 years where antisemitism had subsided, at least apparently, and they could be productive and contributing members of society. This has now ended — partially because of the genocide committed against Israelis by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, with world opinion projecting on Israelis and Jews the false role of perpetrators of genocide in the war in Gaza, but also by bringing back the same old antisemitic views that had been alive in Germany and before then,” Lippman says.

“The fact that many people under 30 do not know or understand [the meaning of] the Holocaust is part of the reason why antisemitism is on the rise again. “The Holocaust was the largest systematic industrial killing of humans in history. This happened only 80 years ago. Young people seem not to be able to grasp the scale of this, but these documents can bring back the memory of what the Holocaust really was,” he said, comparing the propaganda war currently faced by Israel and Jews under a progressive and projectionist guise.

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Beyond the lives of senior Nazis who escaped to South America on the so-called “ratlines”—possibly under the auspices of certain local governments—Lippman said the documents could also provide important information regarding the role played by Swiss and Argentine banks.

“The Holocaust was the greatest theft in history. Many Swiss banks [which were the depositaries of Jewish money] would not release funds to sometimes a sole survivor from a family who perished in the Holocaust without a death certificate for their loved ones. But Auschwitz did not issue death certificates — they only issued ashes.”