Vatican Claims "Progress" on Child Sex Abuse at Un Committee against Torture Hearing

Telegraph
May 5, 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/10809214/Vatican-claims-progress-on-child-sex-abuse-at-UN-Committee-against-Torture-hearing.html

The Vatican's Ambassador to the United Nations Monsignor Silvano Tomasi with Vatican Secretary of State Monsignor Christophe El-Kassis (L) at a hearing before the United Nations (UN) Committee Against Torture Photo: AFP/Getty Images

The Catholic Church has seen a decline in cases of paedophilia after turning a corner in its efforts to tackle sex abuse of children by priests, the Vatican said on Monday.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the UN Committee against Torture the Church had made significant progress in the last decade in stamping out the problem.

“There has been a stabilisation, even a decline in cases of paedophilia in the Church,” he said. “That shows that measures taken in the last 10 years by the Holy See and local churches are bringing about a positive result.”

The claims came as Vatican officials were hauled in front of the United Nations Committee against Torture in Geneva for the first time since the Holy See signed the UN’s convention against torture in 2002. Just four months earlier the Vatican was castigated for its handling of sex abuse scandals by the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child.

In the latest round of criticism, the Committee against Torture accused the Holy See of allowing sexually abusive priests to act with “impunity” against children in their care and of intimidating victims in a bid to silence them.

While torture normally evokes images of human rights abuses in war zones or under repressive regimes, the UN Convention against Torture regards “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of people as also being tantamount to torture.

If the committee finds that past abuses by clergy constitute torture and inhuman treatment, thousands of victims will be able to launch legal action, because in many countries there is no statute of limitations for torture, unlike crimes such as sexual assault.

“To recognise these abuses as acts of torture would assist greatly victims who have faced problems under the statute of limitations,” said Katherine Gallagher, a human rights lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal group based in New York.

The group submitted a report to the UN Committee highlighting the Catholic Church’s refusal to cooperate with police and its attempts to protect sexually predatory priests by moving them from one country to another in order to evade prosecution.

It was disingenuous for the Vatican to insist that its responsibility for implementing the anti-torture convention lay only within the confines of the tiny Vatican City State, which has fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, rather than in the wider Catholic Church, it said.

But the head of the Vatican delegation claimed that it was unfair to single out the Holy See when “millions” of children around the world were sexually abused each year, “by all kinds of professions”.

“Yes, the Church has to do its own cleaning of the house, but it’s important to put this effort into the context of what is happening around the world,” said Archbishop Tomasi.