AUSTRALIA
The Global Mail
By Stephen Crittenden
April 17, 2013
The role of record-keeping is close to the centre of what the royal commission into abuse is all about: the battle between the Closed and the Open Society. But — at least in some cases — documents have been subpoenaed only as far back as 1970.
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In Belgium in 2010, such was the level of paranoia surrounding the investigation of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that police broke into the cathedral tombs of cardinals, drilling holes and poking cameras down in search of hidden cachès of documents – which they didn’t find.
Australia’s national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse doesn’t seem to be provoking anything like those levels of lurid sensationalism, at least not so far.
In his address opening the royal commission this month the chairman, Justice Peter McClellan, welcomed the Catholic Church’s repeated assurances that it wants to co-operate fully with the royal commission, and said he understood that the “enormous task” of collecting and organising documents held by the Church had already begun.
Justice McClellan conceded that most of the organisations whose activities are likely to be of interest to the commission are not yet in a position to provide documentation about their internal management practices or the way they have dealt with complaints of child sexual abuse.
But he also revealed that the commission has already served notice for production of documents on “particular bodies within the Catholic Church in Australia, its insurer, the Salvation Army and the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions.”
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