Originally published on the CGS blog on June 4, 2014.
For months an ongoing battle has emerged in world headlines as the Vatican, the center of the Catholic faith, has been embroiled in an ongoing investigation from the UN’s watchdog agency on torture.
The reason for the UN’s involvement is the Holy See’s membership to the Convention against Torture (CAT), which a sustained global campaign from victim advocacy groups say is being violated by the Vatican’s past and present actions in dealing with victims of child abuse.
According to the Vatican the United Nations Committee against Torture, which oversees the implementation of CAT, has recently found the Holy See not to be in violation of the treaty. However, the CAT Committee refuted this interpretation, with Felice D Gaer CAT’s American vice-chair stating, “we don’t use the word ‘violation’; others do. But it’s quite clear [the Vatican is] not in conformity with the requirements of the convention.”
This case set a new precedent ,as Al-Jazeera reports, “it was the first time the Vatican had been scrutinized since it signed up in 2002 to a global convention banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment.”
To give context to the situation, consider that over 848 priests have been defrocked and another 2,572 given lesser sanctions over the past decade, according to Fox. As with many abuse-related crimes, only a tiny percentage are ever reported, let alone prosecuted.
This point is indirectly made by the Vatican’s ambassador to the UN, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, who claims that since 2004, more than 3,400 credible cases of abuse have been referred to the Vatican, including 401 cases in 2013 alone.
The Holy See’s defense did not focus on these moral concerns, but rather on sovereignty. The main thrust of the investigation was two-pronged:
The first point equated child abuse cases to torture so as to be within the remit of the CAT accords. The Vatican did not oppose this approach as they announced, “the Holy See condemns sex abuse as a serious crime and a grave violation of human dignity.”
The second was to hold the Vatican responsible for its role in cases of abuse worldwide; this point the Vatican contested.
Throughout the lengthy investigation and multiple public grilling sessions the Vatican endured, it maintained that the CAT treaty only applied to the territory of the Vatican itself and that other countries were responsible for themselves. This point was made by the Vatican in a statement that its divisions are not “legally tied to the Vatican as a sovereign” and instead fall under lesser, more locally defined jurisdictions.
Victim advocacy groups highlighted how each national division was required to follow mandates from the Vatican and pay dues similar to taxes, operating like an inter-state structure, but these views were not ultimately upheld.
The Vatican’s status as a sovereign nation is an unusual and hotly debated topic. After the Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Catholic Church were signed, a small piece of Rome was carved out for the new country. But it has no military other than a handful of colorfully decorated soldiers, and has only recently withdrawn its administrative role in its global network.
The Economist notes, “in another change in a sensitive area, the criminal liability of the Vatican’s administration will be extended to make it possible to indict its officials for crimes outside the Vatican city state.”
This recent political maneuver by Pope Francis is credited by some as the saving grace in the recent CAT investigation; the Vatican’s newly limited global reach was referred to national authorities to discourage the argument that the church is responsible for the actions of its members worldwide.
However, victim’s advocacy groups and the CAT committee have rejected this fundamental defense: “The panel’s 10 experts rejected the Holy See’s argument that it only exercises control over the tiny Vatican City State and cannot be held accountable for the actions of Catholic priests and bishops throughout the world.”
To this end the CAT committee has released in its findings a list of strong recommendations for fundamental reform based on the primary concern that the Vatican is not doing enough to combat this continuing epidemic among its clerical ranks.
Preemptively the Vatican released a statement the day before these public recommendations stating themselves cleared of torture by the committee, causing confusion. Although based on technical truths, the Vatican’s side of this issue does not outline the customary practices of international treaties and law where these recommendations hold weight–particularly in developing precedent by holding the Vatican responsible for its global reach now and in the future.
