Dalla Cultural Defense al “test culturale”: luci e (soprattutto) ombre del dibattito italiano

Recently, the interest of part of the Italian legal scholarship, engaged in a reflec- tion on the culturally-motivated crimes and cultural defense for a long time, turned its focus on the development of a “cultural test”. Indeed, according to some scholars, judicial courts already implicitly implemented a valid cultural test. However, in the article I try to point out how even those judicial decisions considered as “enlightened” are the signal of the general confusion that still hovers over the categories used in the debate and in particular of a persis- tent patriarchal “vice” within the internal legal culture. Nonetheless, in my proposal I do not consider that this vice invalidates the opportunity of resorting to cultural tests. Rather, it re- quires a formulation that is at least partially different from those already proposed by schol- ars. The contribution will finally prevent judges from using the cultural argument in a way that is oppressive for women and stigmatizing for the cultural group, in accordance to the provisions of the Istanbul Convention.