Royal Commission Submission Deadline Nears

By Annette Blackwell
The Australian
November 22, 2012

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/royal-commission-submission-deadline-nears/story-fn3dxiwe-1226522539564

IF you want your say on what the terms of reference should be for the Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse in Australia you have until Monday to make a submission or comment.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA) and the Catholic Conference of Bishops will make their submissions on Friday and advocacy group Broken Rites will be doing so on Monday, November 26 - the official government deadline.

Within six days of the announcement of the royal commission, the government reportedly received 300 emails to its website and 180 calls from people and organisations wanting to make submissions.

Groups such as Broken Rites say there have been significant spikes in calls to their organisations since the announcement.

A spokesman for Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has told AAP that once all submissions are in, the number received would be made public, but where it was deemed, appropriate extensions for comment would be given.

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Trouble is, if lengthy extensions are given and the number wishing to have a say is sizeable then the government's own deadline to have the commission constituted next month and running in early 2013 could be threatened.

The government has cast its net very wide in its attempt to gather all views before setting the terms of reference.

Attorney-General Roxon and acting families minister Brendan O'Connor say they want all stakeholders, especially child sexual abuse survivors and their families and advocates, to take part.

"Getting the groundwork right is essential as it ensures that the royal commission will be able to effectively investigate responses to instances and allegations of child sexual abuse in institutions," the ministers said in a statement.

According to some the net was cast too wide, and too soon.

Among those who think this is Professor Scott Prasser, author of Royal Commissions and Public Inquiries in Australia.

He thinks the states should have been consulted on the terms of reference before the announcement was made because the institutions to be scrutinised are state-based and interstate co-operation is essential.

However the federal government goes about this, it will have to walk a fine line in setting terms of reference.

The terms will be the commission's mandate and crucial to its success or failure.

They therefore need to be clear, narrow enough to ensure the inquiry can function effectively, yet according to the lawyers' alliance national president, Tom Kerin, they also need to be "comprehensive".

The government's consultation paper does suggest the commission will be comprehensive with regards to whom it listens; yet narrow because it will be confined to coming up with institutional policy reforms.

Prof Prasser, who is executive director of the Public Policy Institute, told The Australian newspaper this week that the inquiry would become too big if it heard from all victims throughout Australia.

The government has already pointed out that Royal Commissions are not substitutes for criminal investigations but are able to refer matters to police.

If it is purely a policy commission, it might, as a national commission in Ireland did, identify the extent and true nature of the issue. Additional legislation later by the Irish government then addressed matters of compensation and redress.

There is naturally nervousness about this inquiry.

The Catholic Church has already expressed fears it will be a witch-hunt and is very keen to ensure it is not the only institution under the microscope.

The church also says it has reformed its own processes and believes cases uncovered will be historic. Broken Rites dismisses this.

Dr Bernard Barrett, social researcher for the organisation, told AAP the consequences of abuse were ongoing and this needed to be acknowledged and addressed.

No matter how democratic the intention, Catholic Church institutions may end up being the major focus.

This is what happened in Victoria where the state inquiry was charged with looking at child abuse in religious and other non-government organisations.

Lawyer and Monash University researcher Judy Courtin said evidence from victims, police and lawyers in the Victorian inquiry all focused on the Catholic Church because that was where most of the abuse happened.

Courtin is researching sexual assault and the Catholic Church for her PhD thesis but has also researched sexual assault law generally.

For her it is essential that the terms of reference for the federal Royal Commission address premature deaths and suicides related to child abuse.

She says her own interviews with victims of sex abuse show they want truth and justice.

"Justice is a very subjective thing but they all say they want the truth out."

That is probably the most important thing for victims, but they also want an end to concealments and cover-ups.

The task the government has is to meld all the requirements identified in submissions into a reference framework that will not leave some feeling sidelined, and others unfairly targeted.

Although in Courtin's view asking the Catholic Church for input is like "saying to the mafia, 'how do you think we should run this court case'?"

The Catholic Church has been listening to criticisms like that for 50 years ever since Crimen Sollicationis, a 1962 Holy See instruction to clergy codified church procedures to be followed in cases of priests or bishops accused of making sexual advances.

It was interpreted then, and still is interpreted by civil lawyers, as a directive from the Vatican to keep all allegations of sexual abuse secret.

Those breaking that secrecy could face excommunication.

Canon lawyers (specialists in ecclesiastical law) deny the Vatican ever intended its own processes to be a substitute for any secular legal process.

Even outspoken canon lawyer Fr Thomas Patrick Doyle, who in the 1980s first alerted the American bishops to the growing sexual abuse scandal, said in 2006 there was no evidence to interpret church processes "as proof of a conspiracy to hide sexually abusive priests or to prevent the disclosure of sexual crimes committed by clerics to secular authorities."

However, just two years after that, Fr Doyle publicly complained any attempt to reform the Catholic Church in America was like "trudging through what can best be described as a swamp of toxic waste."