In an extraordinary legal case, a woman whose husband became impotent after a car accident that he accepts was all his fault has successfully sued her husband’s insurance company and been awarded €30,000.
The case rested on the fact that the woman – married for 41 years – felt she had been deprived of her sexual rights as a spouse.
The couple’s relationship had always been “warm and loving”, the court heard, and the privation of the woman’s sexual desires caused her “profound anxiety, sadness and permanent suffering”.
The case dates back to 2009 – three years after the accident that left the woman’s husband “sexually incapacitated”.
In the first hearing, the court accepted that the woman had suffered damages, but also considered that her husband’s insurance company had not provided cover for this kind of eventuality.
The woman appealed to Coimbra’s court of appeal, which has finally ruled in her favour, awarding her €30,000 after six years of litigation.
The woman had been asking for €40,000, writes Público, explaining that the court’s decision suggested insurance policies should be rewritten to create a new clause, covering clients for “damages to their life project”.
As Público explains, this isn’t the first time appeal court judges have come out in favour of healthy sexual relationships.
In 2013, a woman was awarded €25,000 for damages resulting from the fact that her husband had been run-over by an uninsured driver and rendered impotent. This was after the man himself had won a €115,000 claim for damages through the courts.
As Correio da Manhã explained, the woman in this case was left “severely traumatised”, and judges ruled that sex within a marriage should be considered much the same as “the right to a personality”.
