LUGANO – “Violence should not be confused with love and passion”. It is with this slogan that Swiss women have for some time risen against the presence, in the Swiss penal code, of the term “crime of passion”. This is article 113, according to which one speaks of a crime of passion when one yields “to a violent emotion of the soul, excusable due to the circumstances, or because in a state of profound emotion”. In similar cases, a penalty lower than that of intentional murder is envisaged for this crime. A situation a little out of time, especially in the era of femicides.
Yet the Swiss Parliament decided not to accept a motion by the Ticino socialist senator, Marina Carobbio, which asked to remove that reference to passion from the Penal Code, in favor of a more neutral term. “Considering the important words – explains a Republic Carobbio – I thought it was appropriate, as is already the case in the German language, which uses the term homicide, or rather murder, to standardize the language also in French and Italian “. For the parliamentarian, it was essentially a question of changing an expression “which gives rise to misunderstandings and which is dangerous for the promotion of gender equality”. “Also because – he recalled – in 2019 in French-speaking Switzerland the word that came in second position was femicide. A term that expresses a serious problem, that of the killing of women for gender reasons “.
In his negative response to the socialist motion, the rapporteur of the committee dealing with the parliamentary act, the liberal Philippe Bauer, he nevertheless relativized the scope of the issue, stating that “contrary to what the media suggests, passionate murder is a crime very little pronounced by the courts”. “My motion – recalls Carobbio – was born from a homicide-suicide, which took place in the Canton of Ticino, where a policeman had first killed his ex-partner and his new friend and then shot himself. Well, the press had insisted a lot on the passionate motive and it is there, reflecting on the importance of words, that I decided it was appropriate to try to change things “.
Meanwhile, on Saturday 18 March, a similar tragedy occurred in Bussigny, near Lausanne, with a 53-year-old policeman who killed his partner, of Hispanic origin, and then took his own life. A case that extends the list of femicides in the Confederation. There are two a day, according to statistics.
“This demonstrates the need for a long process of raising awareness within the police and state services, to take measures to protect women who report violence, so as to prevent it from leading to tragedy”, she comments. Republic the socialist parliamentarian from Geneva, Carlo Sommaruga who, with his colleague Marina Carobbio, supported the abolition of the crime of passionate homicide. “Bussigny’s murder-suicide – says Sommaruga – proves once more how far that term has already passed”.
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