A special committee of the Assemblée nationale, France’s lower house in Paris, has amended a bill against sexist and sexual violence: if the bill becomes law, victims of such violence at work will no longer have to give their consent before an employer can launch an internal investigation into a report.
What is changing?
The bill, known as No. 3106 and tabled on 11 August 2026, sought to require employers to launch an internal investigation “without delay” after a report of workplace violence. Under the original text, this could only happen “with the consent of the alleged victim.” The special committee, which examined the bill from 21 to 23 September 2026, has now removed that condition: under the committee’s text, the employer’s duty to investigate applies even without the victim’s consent.
The original text also set out a fixed procedure for such an investigation: the report must be kept on file, contact between the parties must be avoided as far as possible, and the alleged victim is heard first, followed by witnesses and the alleged perpetrator, with a written report provided to both parties. Under current French law, an internal investigation is not mandatory as long as the employer takes other safety measures; the bill would make it a firm obligation in the cases described, with the original text setting an administrative fine of up to 1 percent of payroll for non-compliance. It is not known whether that percentage remained unchanged after the committee’s review.
Part of a broader “comprehensive law”
Bill 3106 itself is known in France as the “loi intégrale” against sexist and sexual violence targeting women and children; the workplace provision is Article 44 of that bill. There is also a separate organic law on the judicial organisation in this area. The special committee completed its examination of both texts on 23 September 2026. This is so far a bill adopted by the committee, not an adopted law: it still needs to be debated by the full Assemblée nationale.
Context
The debate over reporting and investigation procedures touches on an issue that concerns the entire European Union. In the large-scale EU survey on violence against women by Eurostat, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) and the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), based on data from nearly 115,000 women, 31 percent of working women said they had experienced sexual harassment at work at some point, rising to 42 percent among women aged 18 to 29. Such figures explain why several European lawmakers, alongside international frameworks such as ILO Convention 190 on violence and harassment in the workplace, are seeking to tighten reporting and investigation procedures further.
Source: Proposition de loi sur les VSS : la commission spéciale supprime la nécessité de l’accord de la victime pour lancer une enquête interne, 24 September 2026
Additional research: Assemblée nationale; Voltaire Avocats; Kohen Avocats; EIGE
