One of Julian Assange’s many gifts to the law was to establish in the case of Assange v. Swedish Judicial Authority that where a woman consents to sexual intercourse on condition that the man is wearing a condom, he commits the offence of rape – in English as well as Swedish law – if they then have intercourse without one. (Although whether this is actually what Mr Assange did will never be established as the Swedish authorities discontinued the prosecution last November).
In 2013, judges went a step further and decided that a man who obtained consent by promising to practise ‘coitus interruptus’ was guilty of rape if he harboured a secret intention to break his promise.
So one would have thought that if a man obtains consent by telling his partner that he has had a vasectomy, he would be committing rape if he was lying. According to the Court of Appeal, which decided just such a case last week, the law says otherwise.
