VATICAN CITY
Los Angeles Times
Tom Kington
At the first hearing in a controversial Vatican trial of five people accused of leaking Holy See documents, judges have thrown out a request by one of the defendants to drop the case because it violates human rights.
Emiliano Fittipaldi, one of two authors on trial who published confidential reports of greed and corruption at the Vatican, told the court he was incredulous to find himself on trial for “simply having published news.”
Fittipaldi faces up to eight years in jail, alongside fellow Italian author Gianluigi Nuzzi, for publishing findings from a Vatican committee set up by Pope Francis in 2013 to weed out waste and wrongdoing at the Vatican.
Also facing trial for violating Vatican laws against leaks are three members of the committee accused of releasing the information: Spanish priest Angel Lucio Vallejo Balda, who is currently locked up in a Vatican cell, his assistant Nicola Maio and Italian public-relations expert Francesca Chaouqui. All five were present in the courtroom Tuesday.
After asking to address the court, Fittipaldi said: “I feel I must express above all my incredulousness at finding myself a defendant before a court which is not that of my country, even though I wrote and published in Italy the book for which I have been incriminated.” …
Speaking during a break in the trial, Nuzzi called the trial “Kafkaesque.”
“We are not martyrs, just journalists,” he said. “But there are principles that must be defended.”
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