AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By JOANNE McCARTHY Oct. 3, 2013
NSW Police and the Catholic Church worked together for years under informal agreements that were in direct conflict with requirements to report child abuse, internal police documents have shown.
The arrangements allowed the church to produce edited abuse reports, carry out investigations and decline to release the results to police without court orders.
When a senior NSW Police officer advised the church in August 2003 that an unsigned memorandum of understanding (MOU) appeared to be ‘‘in direct conflict’’ with legal requirements to report crime, police did not investigate whether the church had failed to report abuse cases.
A year later the church proposed a fresh MOU giving accused clergy and employees effective veto over the release of internal church investigations to police.
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