German cabinet approves draft bill criminalizing sexualized deepfakes, voyeurism, and rape videos

Cabinet approves new criminal offences

On 7 October 2026, the German Federal Cabinet adopted a draft law presented by Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig to combat digital violence. The legislative package establishes several new criminal offenses in the German Criminal Code and broadens protections against unauthorized intimate recordings. The draft aims to provide legal recourse for victims, who are predominantly women, enabling them to pursue court actions and obtain account bans against offenders. The proposal will now move to the Bundestag for parliamentary debate and a final vote.

Minister Hubig defended the legislative measures by pointing to the widespread prevalence of digital abuse online.

Digital violence is like a wildfire. Sexualized deepfakes and voyeuristic recordings circulate millions of times on the internet.

Penalties for deepfakes, rape videos, and voyeurism

Under the proposed rules, creating non-consensual pornographic deepfakes becomes an offense upon generation, while distributing other non-consensual deepfakes is penalized if it causes substantial harm to the victim. The draft law also criminalizes obtaining, possessing, or streaming recordings of actual rapes involving adults, which previously did not carry blanket penalties under German law. Such acts will carry sentences of up to two years in prison or a fine, while producing and distributing rape videos will carry penalties of up to three years in prison or a fine. In addition, the legislation penalizes cyberstalking via GPS trackers and online identity abuse.

Broadening protection for intimate spaces

The bill extends privacy protections to cover non-consensual photography or filming of unclothed genitals, bare buttocks, and female breasts in spaces such as saunas and nudist beaches. It also prohibits intrusive recordings of clothed individuals, such as filming a runner's buttocks through stretch pants, alongside upskirting. These provisions resolve legal loopholes seen in previous cases, including an incident in Leipzig where two women were filmed without consent in a sauna, but prosecutors could not bring charges because non-distributed recordings were not illegal under existing law. The perpetrator in that case had his mobile phone returned with the footage intact.

High-profile cases and institutional reactions

The debate over digital violence gained momentum earlier in 2026 following high-profile incidents, including one involving actress and presenter Collien Fernandes, who faced identity theft and synthetic sexual material. Another case in Lower Saxony involved an employee of the CDU state parliamentary group who altered a female colleague's image using artificial intelligence and shared the sexualized depictions in a chat group named "MitGLIEDER". A first draft of the legislation was published in April 2026 before revisions were finalized for the cabinet.

The German Judges Association warned that statutory changes alone cannot resolve the issue without adequate judicial resources. Federal managing director Sven Rebehn noted that federal states must address staffing shortages across overloaded criminal courts, adding that victims' claims for information depend on having sufficient judges and mandatory storage of internet addresses. Criminal law professor Tonio Walter from the University of Regensburg also observed that while punishing deepfake distribution is appropriate, public discourse has progressively broadened the definition of violence to encompass psychological, sexualized, and digital acts.