Showdown at UN over Vatican’s abuses
16 Jan 2014 5:41 AM IST
The Holy See on Thursday will be grilled by a UN committee in Geneva on its implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Among other things, the treaty calls for signatories to take all appropriate measures to protect children from harm and to put children’s interests above all else.
The Holy See ratified the convention in 1990 and submitted a first implementation report in 1994. But it didn’t provide progress reports for nearly a decade, and only submitted one in 2012 after coming under criticism following the 2010 explosion of child sex abuse cases in Europe and beyond.
Victims groups and human rights organizations rallied together to press the UN committee to challenge the Holy See on its abuse record, providing written testimony from victims and evidence outlining the global scale of the problem. Their reports cite case studies in Mexico and Britain, grand jury investigations in the US, and government fact-finding inquiries from Canada to Ireland to Australia that detail how the Vatican’s policies, its culture of secrecy and fear of scandal contributed to the problem.
Their submissions reference Vatican documents that show its officials knew about a notorious Mexican molester decades before taking action.
They cite correspondence from a Vatican cardinal praising a French bishop’s decision to protect his abusive priest, and another Vatican directive to Irish bishops to strike any mandatory reporting of abusers to police from their policies.
The submissions even quote the former Vatican No. 2 as saying bishops shouldn’t be expected to turn their priests in.
‘For too many years, survivors were the only ones speaking out about this and bearing the brunt of a lot of criticism,’ said Pam Spees, a human rights attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provided a key report to the committee.
The Holy See ratified the convention in 1990 and submitted a first implementation report in 1994. But it didn’t provide progress reports for nearly a decade, and only submitted one in 2012 after coming under criticism following the 2010 explosion of child sex abuse cases in Europe and beyond.
Victims groups and human rights organizations rallied together to press the UN committee to challenge the Holy See on its abuse record, providing written testimony from victims and evidence outlining the global scale of the problem. Their reports cite case studies in Mexico and Britain, grand jury investigations in the US, and government fact-finding inquiries from Canada to Ireland to Australia that detail how the Vatican’s policies, its culture of secrecy and fear of scandal contributed to the problem.
Their submissions reference Vatican documents that show its officials knew about a notorious Mexican molester decades before taking action.
They cite correspondence from a Vatican cardinal praising a French bishop’s decision to protect his abusive priest, and another Vatican directive to Irish bishops to strike any mandatory reporting of abusers to police from their policies.
The submissions even quote the former Vatican No. 2 as saying bishops shouldn’t be expected to turn their priests in.
‘For too many years, survivors were the only ones speaking out about this and bearing the brunt of a lot of criticism,’ said Pam Spees, a human rights attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provided a key report to the committee.
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