By Niamh Kennedy, Kara Fox, CNN
London (CNN) — European lawmakers have voted in favor of defining sex without active consent as rape, marking a historic step for women’s rights and survivors of sexual violence in the EU.
The European Parliament’s resolution, passed on Tuesday by an overwhelming margin, urges all EU member states to adopt an only “yes means yes” legal standard for consent while recognizing that a “yes” obtained through coercion is not valid.
The move seeks to replace the traditional “no means no” principle, which activists argue fails to protect victims by not requiring explicit, affirmative consent for sexual acts.
The resolution is the just the first step in the political process: It will now need to be proposed as legislation for EU member states to vote on.
Dutch MEP Anna Strolenberg said that “a society that truly respects women does not ask whether they resisted enough, it asks whether they freely agreed.” She told CNN, “No one can consent while asleep, drugged, unaware or paralyzed by fear. Any law that leaves room for this doubt, leaves room for violence,”
At present, rape laws in Europe generally follow one of two models – consent-based, which considers rape a sexual act without consent, or coercion-based, which requires a sexual act to have taken place by force. Twenty-one of the EU’s 27 member states have adopted consent-based rape laws, according to Amnesty International, and in some, including Sweden and Spain, the law follows the “yes means yes” approach. Meanwhile, in countries like Hungary and Latvia, the law generally requires proof of use of force, threats, or coercion.
Those legislative gaps create significant hurdles for survivors, experts say, as it requires them to prove the use of violence or threats.
French MEP Manon Aubry said in a debate ahead of the vote that laws that do not recognize the importance of active consent allow “perpetrators to have full impunity.”
In October 2025, France, after years of opposition, updated its criminal code to explicitly define rape as any sexual act committed without consent. The move followed a public reckoning in the wake of the landmark Pelicot trial, where 50 men were charged with the mass rape of Gisèle Pelicot, whose ex-husband Dominique Pelicot drugged her, and organized her rapes with men he met online.
“Important step” in fight against “rape culture”
A series of similar, high-profile drug-facilitated sexual abuse (DFSA) cases have also come to light in Europe. In December, a German man was found guilty of drugging and raping his unconscious wife over several years and filming the assaults.
While European lawmakers have historically struggled to agree on a unified, EU-wide definition of rape, Irish MEP Maria Walsh said that CNN’s recent reporting on an online “rape academy” has accelerated the debate.
CNN’s discovery of a Telegram group, where nearly 1,000 men shared step-by-step instructions on drugging and assaulting their partners, and which was part of a wider network of non-consensual image sharing, underlines “why a European-wide response is so badly needed” when it comes to prosecuting sexual assault, Walsh said.
Amnesty International’s Dinushika Dissanayake welcomed Tuesday’s resolution, saying that it was an important step in the fight against “rape culture,” which is underpinned and perpetuated by harmful myths and gender stereotypes, (and) attempts to normalize and even justify sexual violence in our societies.”
One in six women in the EU experience sexual violence in adulthood, according to Amnesty, with one in 10 women raped in their lifetime.
“At a time when the headlin