The pitfalls of the Italian response to international obligations of criminalization of gender violence

Gender oriented international law has historically been at the basis of the development of international sources of coercive obligations for addressing gender violence at the national level. The nature of these obligations range from implicit and presupposed obligations stemming from a framing of intimate partner violence as a serious human rights violation by the international jurisprudence of the ad hoc criminal tribunals as well as by the cedaw Committee and the ECtHR case law, on one hand and, on the other hand, explicit sources of the enactment of national criminal legislation for sanctioning any form of gender violence codified in the Istanbul and Lanzarote Conventions. In the light of such international rationale behind the obligation of criminalisation of gender violence, Italy’s full national compliance proposed and the choice to ‘neutralize’ the symbolic function of criminalisation will be queried and possible remedies for missing profiles of implementation will be proposed.