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Victims say child abuse at Vatican must be seen as torture
Press TV (Iran)
Victim groups have demanded that abuse by Catholic clerics be recognized as torture, as Vatican officials are grilled by a UN committee. The appeal was made by victims and their lawyers on Monday. They argued that even though the Vatican is a signatory to the 1987 UN Convention on Torture, it has violated torture agreements. “There is a body of national and international law in which rape and sexual abuse has been recognized as a form of torture and cruel and degrading treatment,” said Pam Spees, a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CRC) in New York. The Vatican faced questioning by a UN committee over the global child sex abuse scandal involving priests. The panel accused the church of ducking responsibility on the issue. The UN committee is to examine whether the Vatican record on child protection breaches the body’s Convention Against Torture and plans to present its final observations and recommendations on May 23. Katherine Gallagher, another CRC lawyer, said if the UN committee finds that the abuse amounts to torture and inhuman treatment, it could trigger a large number of abuse lawsuits dating back decades since there are no statute of limitations on torture cases. The Catholic Church has been rocked by growing cases of child sex abuse filed against priests in recent years. In January, when the first questioning was held, a UN human rights committee rejected a similar argument the Vatican made in an attempt to limit its responsibility. During the January meeting, the committee slammed the Vatican for adopting policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of children. The committee also blasted the Vatican’s practice of transferring the abusing clergymen from parish to parish in a bid to cover up their crimes.
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