Post-Talpis Reflections: Reassessing and Redefining ECHR Standards and Italy’s Approach to Domestic Violence

Talpis v. Italy still offers the interpreter a privileged vantage point on the subject of States’ obligations to protect victims of domestic violence. In particular, it gives the opportunity to bring into clearer focus some recurrent issues connected to the violations of Articles 2, 3 and 14 ECHR and to the parameters used by the European Court of Human Rights to address them. Nevertheless, in the course of the Court’s analysis, one gets the impression that something is missing. The same perception arises with reference to the most recent interventions of the Italian legislature, adopted in response to the critical issues underlined by the Court not least in Talpis, as well as to the emotional thrust of tragic news events. Above all, it is the excessive reliance on measures in the sphere of substantive and procedural criminal law that appears unsatisfactory from a perspective that demands criminal law to be the ultima ratio of State intervention. The plethora of subsequent legislative interventions, the Court’s further pronouncements on the subject and, most importantly, the persistently alarming statistics on gender-based violence in Italy collectively warrant the search for the missing piece in the Court’s reasoning. Consequently, this chapter endeavors to conceptualize a complementary, rather than alternative, approach to addressing domestic violence, through the valorization of a complex of normative positive responses consisting in measures of an economic, social and cultural nature.