In 2001 the court acquitted a health service manager from Venice after a female colleague accused him of squeezing her bottom.

The court said that it did not constitute a sexual offence provided that it was “fleeting, isolated and impulsive” rather than part of a premeditated campaign of sexual harassment and provided that the man had no libidinous intent.

Yesterday, however, the court upheld an 11-month sentence imposed on Michele Annunziata, a magistrate, for patting three women on their behinds. Its volte-face may have been influenced by the fact that Annunziata was taking part in a case at the Supreme Court itself at the time and that the women he molested were Supreme Court employees.

Annunziata insisted that his gestures had been fleeting and impulsive. They amounted at most to vulgar behaviour and certainly did not “endanger or infringe the liberty” of the women.

The court said that he had committed acts of sexual violence by touching the bottoms of the three women in “a lascivious manner”. That amounted to an attack from behind, since the defendant had caught the women unawares and had touched them without their consent. This was also an abuse of office and an offence to the Supreme Court, on whose premises the offence took place.

The judges said that “any act resulting in body contact between an active subject and a passive subject” was a sexual offence, even if the act was not premeditated. It was not an obscene act — an offence carrying a heavier penalty — but it was “an invasion of the woman’s sexual integrity” and a substantive and concrete intrusion into the victims’ sexual sphere. “

Such acts, however superficial, amount to assault,” they said.

The court rejected Annunziata’s defence that his bottom-patting had been occasional, noting that the women had testified that he had taken every opportunity to fondle them, for example when they were passing through a door or answering the phone.

The court, whose membership is almost exclusively male and elderly, has delivered other contradictory judgments in recent years. In 1999 it ruled that a woman wearing tight jeans could not be raped because removal of the jeans required the woman’s consent. Later it reversed that judgment after protests from women MPs led by Alessandra Mussolini, the far-Right deputy for Naples and granddaughter of the Duce. It has ruled that a kiss on the neck is permissible on the ground that the neck is not an erogenous zone, and that a teacher who played “footsie” under the table with female pupils was not guilty of sexual harassment.

The legal confusion has arisen partly because Italy has no legislation on sexual harassment. Political correctness has been slow to make inroads in a male-dominated society.

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