The subject of this thesis is the criminalization of the current consent-based rape provision (hereinafter “the provision”) in section 216 (1) of the Danish Criminal Law.
When reviewing the provision in section 216 (1) of the Danish Criminal Law, the legislative material of the provision will be included. The legislative material of the provision will be reviewed by outlining the substance of the provision before the amendment, including the Council of Criminal Law’s proposals to a new elaboration of the provision and the Minister of Justice’s speculations on the subject. In extensions hereof, the parliamentary report of the Council of Criminal Law will be reviewed. The review will encompass the two different proposals presented by the council, as well as what similarities and differences were considered in these proposals. These proposals were based on “consent” and “voluntary” respectively.

As an introduction to the analysis section of the selected judgments regarding the Danish rape provision, the contents of the current rape provision will be compared to the previous rape provision, for the purpose of clarifying how these differ from one another. Nine selected judgments are included with the purpose of analyzing the current rape provision, where only judgments where the course of the events, which led to the judgement, occurred after the amendment to a consent-based rape provision came into effect. For each judgment, the course of the judgment and verdicts in the various judicatures will first be reviewed, after which a number of selected topics will be analyzed, including the sentencing and the possibility of conviction according to the wording of the previous rape provision. The selected topics, which have been analyzed in the judgments, are specifically selected for each judgment where it seems relevant and/or decisive in the court’s verdict of the respective case. The judgments will be compared on a number of selected relevant points that recur in the judgments or are found particularly relevant to the current jurisprudence after the amendment.

Finally, the thesis will have an overall conclusion to the thesis statement as well as a perspective on whether the legal image of the current jurisdiction so far after the amendment of section 216 (1) reflects the purposes behind the desired amendment in the rape provision, as it was stated in the preliminary work to the consent-based rape provision.