Last week the International Justice Tribunal reported that a lawyer for members of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has requested the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into Pope Benedict and three upper-level cardinals. The 82-page complaint, which can be found here, was accompanied by 20,000 pages of documents which allegedly implicate these clergymen in aiding, abetting and covering up wide-scale child sexual abuse by Catholic priests.
This is the latest volley in a controversy which has dogged the Vatican for some time, of course. And it's not the first time it has been suggested that the Pope and some of his minions should face justice before the ICC or another international court. British human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson has been arguing for some time that the international community should "Put the Pope in the Dock," to no small amount of controversy.
The SNAP lawyer, Pam Spees, has pooh-poohed the potential for jurisdictional problems regarding the case. In my own view, the jurisdictional problems are profound. The ICC mostly does not have temporal jurisdiction to begin with, since it can only exercise jurisdiction over crimes which occurred after 1 July 2002. In the IJT article Spees' response to this is to describe some abuse which occurred after that date, but the facts she gives indicates that the victimization occurred in the U.S. and the priest was a national of India -- neither of which states have signed the Rome Statute, which bars any possible case on jurisdictional grounds. That's unless the Security Council were to become involved, which seems unlikely. And that's putting aside whether the conduct in question even amounts to a "crime against humanity" as defined in the Rome Statute, which is also doubtful.
About two years ago, I did a television interview on this matter, and my views haven't changed. I would like nothing better than to see the Vatican bear responsibility for the evil its clergy have done throughout the world, but there's no use trying to bootleg claims into a court which manifestly doesn't have jurisdiction and is, in any event, unlikely to want to exercise it over the Pope when there are maniacal dictators and their staffs to prosecute.
The best way to pursue this is through civil claims, which will put money in the hands of the victims and help them to rebuild their lives. On that point, Robertson and others have attacked the main legal issue, which is whether the Vatican has and is entitled to state immunity before the courts of states. That's the big challenge, but fortunately the Vatican's immunity is under attack in a number of cases around the world, including a couple in the U.S.
It's ironic, perhaps, that an organization that claims a rather large amount of moral authority has put such an intense effort into dodging the moral obligations it owes to its victims. The important work of putting legal teeth into those moral obligations must continue.
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