Child-rights panel grills Vatican

Sex-abuse prosecution a local matter, U.N. questioners told

Vatican's UN Ambassador Monsignor Silvano Tomasi, left, speaks with Former Vatican Chief Prosecutor of Clerical Sexual Abuse Charles Scicluna, right, prior to the start of a questioning over clerical sexual abuse of children at the headquarters of the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR, in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014. The Vatican came under blistering criticism from a U.N. committee Thursday for its handling of the global priest sex abuse scandal, facing its most intense public grilling ever over allegations that it protected pedophile priests at the expense of victims. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini)
Vatican's UN Ambassador Monsignor Silvano Tomasi, left, speaks with Former Vatican Chief Prosecutor of Clerical Sexual Abuse Charles Scicluna, right, prior to the start of a questioning over clerical sexual abuse of children at the headquarters of the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR, in Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014. The Vatican came under blistering criticism from a U.N. committee Thursday for its handling of the global priest sex abuse scandal, facing its most intense public grilling ever over allegations that it protected pedophile priests at the expense of victims. (AP Photo/Keystone, Martial Trezzini)

GENEVA - The Vatican drew blistering criticism from a U.N. committee Thursday for its handling of the global sex-abuse scandal, facing its most intense public grilling to date over allegations that it protected pedophile priests at the expense of victims.

The Vatican insisted that it had little jurisdiction to sanction pedophile priests around the globe, saying it was for local law enforcement to do so. But officials conceded that more needs to be done and promised to build on progress already made to become a model for others, given the scale of the problem and the role the Holy See plays in the international community.

“The Holy See gets it,” Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s former sex crimes prosecutor, told the committee. “Let’s not say too late or not. But there are certain things that need to be done differently.”

He was responding to a grilling by the U.N. committee over the Holy See’s failure to abide by terms of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child which, among other things, calls for signatories to take all appropriate measures to keep children from harm. Critics accuse the church of enabling the rape of thousands of children by encouraging a culture of cover-up to defend its reputation.

Groups representing victims of clerical abuse that have been active in civil litigation against the church gave the U.N. committee hundreds of pages of documents on which the questioning was based. The groups have welcomed the hearing as the first time the Vatican has had to publicly defend its record in what amounted to a courtroom cross-examination where no limits were placed on the questioning.

But Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests said Thursday that the Vatican’s responses seem like “more of the same.”

While insisting on that legal separation, the Vatican did respond to questions about cases even where it had no jurisdiction or involvement, and on many occasions welcomed recommendations on ways to make children safer.

“I’m with you when you say, All these nice words will not mean anything … if there is not more transparency and accountability on the local level,’” Scicluna told committee member Benyam Mezmur, an Ethiopian academic who asked what it would take for the Holy See to sanction bishops who fail to report pedophiles to police.

Scicluna has been credited even by victims with helping bring the Vatican around over the past decade, overhauling its internal norms to make it easier to defrock abusers and calling for greater accountability by bishops who allowed priests to roam free.

He said local criminal prosecutors must go after anyone - “whoever these people are” - who obstructs justice.

The committee’s main human-rights investigator, Sara de Jesus Oviedo Fierro, was particularly tough on the Vatican delegation, asking repeated and informed follow-up questions and refusing to let the Vatican duck the answers. Oviedo, a sociologist from Ecuador who was elected in June to serve as the committee’s vice president, pressed the Vatican delegation on the frequent ways abusive priests were transferred rather than turned over to police.

Given the church’s “zero tolerance” policy, she asked, why were there “efforts to cover up and obscure these types of cases?”

Committee members repeatedly asked the Holy See to provide data about the scale of the problem, but the Vatican deferred, saying it would consider the request.They also asked what Pope Francis intends to do with a new commission announced last month to find best practices to protect children from abuse and help victims heal. In addition, the members sought information about accusations that the Vatican’s own ambassador to the Dominican Republic had sexually abused teenage boys.

The U.N. committee is made up of independent experts - not other U.N. member states - and it will deliver final observations and nonbinding recommendations on Feb. 5. The committee has no ability to sanction the Vatican for any shortcomings, but the process is aimed at encouraging, and sometimes shaming, treaty signatories into honoring their international commitments.

The Holy See ratified the U.N. convention in 1990 and submitted a first implementation report in 1994. But it didn’t provide progress reports for nearly two decades. It only submitted one in 2012 after coming under criticism after the 2010 explosion of child sex-abuse cases in Europe and beyond.

Victims groups and human-rights organizations teamed up to press the U.N. committee to challenge the Holy See on its abuse record, providing it with reports of written testimony from victims and evidence outlining the global scale of the problem.

The Holy See has long insisted that it isn’t responsible for abusive priests, saying they aren’t employees of the Vatican but rather members of the broader 1.2-billion-strong Catholic Church over which the Vatican exercises limited control. It has maintained that bishops are responsible for the priests in their care, not the pope.

Front Section, Pages 8 on 01/17/2014

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