France, April 24 -- The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that France failed to protect the rights of three teenage girls who reported being raped, as the country debates changing how the crime of rape is defined.

In its ruling, delivered on Thursday, the ECHR found that "the investigating authorities and the domestic courts had failed to protect the applicants, who had complained of acts of rape and had been aged only 13, 14 and 16 at the relevant dates, in an adequate manner".

French courts had not "taken sufficient account, in evaluating whether the applicants had been capable of understanding and of giving consent, of the particularly vulnerable situations in which they had found themselves," the court added.

Rulings by the ...