Current law in Germany requires a victim to prove that the suspect either threatened or actively used violence, or exploited a situation from which the victim could not escape, for instance by trapping them in a room from which they could not leave.

Under that law, the threshold for evidence required to press rape charges is so high that only one in 10 rapes is reported, the Justice Ministry said. Of those cases that do proceed to court, 8 percent lead to a conviction.

Germany, which did not criminalize marital rape until 1997, has one of the worst records in Europe for protecting its women from sexual violence, said Brendan Wynne, a spokesman for Equality Now, an international rights organization that lobbies for better protection for women and girls.

“Germany have been laggards for a long time,” Mr. Wynne said. “This understanding of women and how you treat them, and how you value them, seems to be an issue in Germany. We are sort of waiting for them to catch up.”

BFF, Germany’s federal association of rape crisis and women’s counseling centers welcomed the new legislation as a “paradigm change” in how the country deals with sexual violence. “No longer is coercion the requirement for the prosecution of sexual assault, but the will of the victim,” the association said.

Yet Katja Grieger, managing director of BFF, and others were critical of a clause in the legislation that would make it easier to deport foreigners charged with sexual assault, arguing that such a provision did not belong in a rape law.

After the vote in Parliament, #neinheisstnein, German for “no means no,” topped the list of Twitter trends in Germany, with many welcoming the bill as a significant improvement.