A couple of law stories – with no comment – simply because I have just read them and found them interesting.
Canon law has allowed abuse priests to escape punishment, says lawyer
The Guardian: Geoffrey Robertson QC calls for end of church law and chides UK government for recognising Vatican’s sovereignty
The system of law operated by the Vatican has allowed serious sex offenders to escape punishment and must be abandoned, says a prominent lawyer.
According to Geoffrey Robertson QC, whose book The Case of the Pope is published tomorrow: “Canon law has been allowed to trump criminal law in countries throughout the world. This is a very serious matter‚ the pope through his pretensions to statehood refuses to acknowledge that child sex abuse is a serious crime as well as a sin.
“The Catholic church must abandon canon law as a punishment for priests who commit crimes.”
The church’s form of law, Robertson argues, “has no public hearings, no DNA test facilities, no enforcement mechanism, and the most severe punishments – excommunication or an order to return to the laity (without entry on a sex offenders’ register) – bears no comparison with the sentences of imprisonment or community service that can be expected under criminal law.”
News Corp. Is Freaking Out
Michael Wolff: “You don’t get it,” a member of News Corporation’s inner circle in London told me last night, about the phone hacking scandal. “If there was a conspiracy in the company, the conspiracy was to keep Rupert from knowing.”
That is called the circle-the-wagons defense. That’s called everybody-else-is-expendable. That’s called a total freak-out.
The company has been caught as unaware, as unprepared, as incapable of responding, as on the ropes, as it ever has in its 60-year history. News Corp. only knows how to be the aggressor; now it’s on the defensive—and it has to defend itself against the very thing that it has always been, that has always protected it, that is the reason for its fundamental pride: Its newsrooms are down and dirty.
Surely, it is not only the R.C. Church which is at fault here. It is individual States which administer their criminal law and there must have been failures to properly investigate and bring charges. States do not have to allow the church to rely on “canon law”. Of course, I readily accept the difficulties inherent in such investigations and the difficulties of obtaining witnesses willing to testify.
As for the “pretence to Statehood” – it seems to be generally accepted that The Vatican is a State with the Pope as its head. Most countries seem to view it that way. I would be interested to see the argument to the contrary.
I thought Robertson’s piece was excellent.
Yes, Mr Robertson’s piece is characteristically excellent BUT it is not the Church which administers criminal law. Those States (including UK) which have failed to properly investigate alleged crimes against the criminal law are equally culpable in my view. It does not matter who the alleged criminal is, the Police should have conducted proper investigations. For too many years this was not done.
The situation in Ireland was reported by the BBC here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8381119.stm