There are some speeches we’d like to be able to ignore. The one delivered by Fernand Kartheiser, a Luxembourgish Member of the European Parliament and president of the ADR, during the plenary session on April 27, 2026, as part of the debates on European legislation regarding consent, is not one of them. Not because it’s original, it isn’t. But because it was said into the microphone, in the chamber, in front of the cameras. And because it’s circulating. We might as well address it head-on, point by point.
1. "Feminism betrays women"
This is the foundation of the entire argument, presented as self-evident: feminism supposedly prevents women from achieving their natural happiness, meaning a husband, children, and a well-ordered life. The argument is as old as the resistance to women’s rights. It assumes that without feminism, women would be fulfilled. It carefully glosses over what they experienced before.
Yet the European Parliament, in a resolution adopted in February 2023 on the Istanbul Convention, states that one in three women in the European Union has experienced physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. The gender pay gap in Europe still stood at 16.4% in 2012. In 2021, it fell to 12.7%, a decline directly linked to equality policies driven largely by feminist movements. Furthermore, the European Parliament documents in its official fact sheets that it took ten years of negotiations to secure, in 2022, a directive requiring more women on the boards of directors of large publicly traded companies. Ten years. For that. Not exactly the picture of a feminism that betrays anyone.
What feminism actually complicates is the ability of certain men to continue exercising unchallenged power over women. It’s not quite the same thing.
2. "Men facing incalculable legal risks"
This is the central argument, the one around which the entire discourse is organized: consent laws would put men at risk when they “court a woman or engage in sexual relations with her.” It’s worth noting that in this framing, courting and having sex are lumped together. As if the risk of being prosecuted for rape also threatened the man who gives flowers.
In reality, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, in its reference document on false accusations, establishes that the rate of false reports ranges from 2 to 10% of complaints filed. It further specifies that this figure is regularly overestimated, since a complaint that is dismissed or withdrawn is not, by definition, a false accusation.
But the figure that should really concern F. Kartheiser is this: according to a victimization survey by the Ministry of the Interior’s Statistical Service, published on the government website “Stop Violence,” only 7% of victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault in France have filed a complaint. It is therefore not men who risk being wrongfully imprisoned. It is women who do not even go to the police station.
3. "Prosecutions without evidence, even after decades"
The extension of the statute of limitations for sexual crimes is presented as a legal aberration, a threat hanging over every ordinary man. This framing systematically ignores why these time limits exist.
The answer lies in neuroscience. Anna Möller, a gynecologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, published a study in 2017 in the journal Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica involving 298 women who sought emergency care for rape. The result: 70% of them experienced an episode of tonic immobility during the assault, 48% of them in an extreme form. This phenomenon is an involuntary neurobiological reaction to a threat perceived as inescapable. It paralyzes the body and speech. It increases the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder by a factor of 2.75. It explains the silence, the inability to resist, and often the years it takes to put into words what happened.
It is precisely to account for this clinical reality, not to create retroactive victims, that laws extend the statute of limitations. As for the “lack of evidence”: rape occurs in private, without witnesses. It is structurally a crime that is difficult to prove. No evidence, no trial. No trial, no conviction. F. Kartheiser’s reasoning does not protect the innocent. It protects the guilty.
4. “Turning every sexual act into a potential criminal case”
The image of a “written consent contract” is a caricature. It corresponds to no existing or proposed text. What the European directive and the French law of November 6, 2025 establish is a definition of consent based on five cumulative criteria: free, informed, specific, prior, and revocable. As the legal website lekbinet.com explains in its analysis of the law, silence or a lack of reaction no longer constitutes consent. The legal question is no longer “did she resist?” but “did she freely consent?”
This French reform received 327 votes in favor and 15 abstentions in the Senate, as reported by FranceInfo. It is part of a broader trend: at the time of the vote, 17 of the 27 EU member states had already incorporated consent into their criminal definition of rape, with Germany, Sweden, and Spain having done so well before France. Yet none of these countries has seen its citizens forced to sign a document before any sexual encounter. The idea that a consent law “bureaucratizes eroticism” is fear-mongering, not legal analysis. It is designed to suggest to men that they are in danger. They are not. No more than a driver is in danger simply because there is a traffic code.
5. “This parliament is overstepping its authority: criminal law is a national matter”
This is the only argument that seems serious on the surface. Criminal law is indeed a national competence within the EU’s institutional framework. This principle has already had concrete effects: in 2024, during negotiations on the directive on violence against women, several member states, including France, invoked exactly this argument to block any provision on consent. The directive was adopted, but stripped of that section. F. Kartheiser therefore knows full well that the argument works. He has already seen it work.
It was precisely to circumvent this deadlock that the European Parliament adopted, on April 28, 2026, an own-initiative report calling for a common definition of rape based on the absence of consent in all Member States, with 447 votes in favor and 160 against, according to the Parliament’s official press release. This text does not directly legislate: it calls on the Commission to act. But it sends a political signal to Member States, eight of which, from Italy to Hungary and Romania, still require the victim to prove physical or verbal resistance for the act to be recognized as rape.
There is a difference between engaging in a serious constitutional debate on the EU’s competences and using it as a shield to block any legal protection for victims. F. Kartheiser is not advocating for better national criminal law. He is arguing against the definition of consent, period. The institutional argument is merely a smokescreen.
Almost the entire playbook
In just a few minutes, this speech recycled a good portion of the anti-feminist playbook: women thriving in submission, men in danger, lying victims, a corrupt justice system, a tyrannical Europe. This is not a philosophical perspective on relationships or freedom. It is a political intervention intended to prevent women from accessing concrete legal protection.
The European Parliament voted 447 to 160 in April 2026. As for F. Kartheiser, he had his moment in the spotlight. That moment is already circulating, edited, spliced, and shared on social media platforms where this type of rhetoric thrives. That is why we must respond, with facts in hand.