By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A high ranking judge for the United Nations (UN) is calling for Pope Benedict XVI to be detained during his upcoming visit to Britain and sent to trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for “crimes against humanity.”
According to a report by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), UN judge Geoffrey Robertson said in an article published in London last Friday that because the Pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church, he is ultimately responsible for sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests around the world.
Whether that will ever happen is another story.
Professor Hurst Hannum of the Fletcher School at Tufts University told C-FAM that it would be a “real stretch” to use the ICC since that court’s jurisdiction is mainly reserved for crimes during war. However, it would be possible for Robertson and other likeminded experts to invoke a principle of “universal jurisdiction” which would allow national courts around the world to detail the pope as soon as he stepped foot on their soil. But even this method could be in violation of sovereignty as it is enshrined in the UN Charter.
C-FAM’s Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D., says that Robertson insists that “the ICC could be used as long as the Pope’s sovereign immunity was waived and as long as jurists can show that the sex abuse scandal was carried out on a ‘widespread or systematic scale,’ the way that child soldiers were used in the wars in Sierra Leone and the way that sex slaves are traded internationally.”
As it turns out, Robertson is a tort lawyer who believes prosecution needs to reach into higher levels of the Church in order to secure more money for victims of abuse in diocese that have gone into bankruptcy.
Yashihara also notes that Robertson has long been campaigning to strip the Holy See of its permanent observer status at the UN, and has publicly referred to the Holy See “the world’s largest NGO.” When a campaign was launched in 1999 to oust the Vatican, member states rallied around them and, in 2004, its status was actually expanded.
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