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UN slams Vatican over handling child sex abuse cases
May 24, 2014 by
Fri May 23, 2014 5:24PM GMT
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The United
Nations Committee against Torture has slammed the Vatican over its handling of
sexual abuse of minors by pedophile priests, saying clerics must comply with a
UN anti-torture treaty.
The UN committee said on Friday that Vatican officials have failed
to report abuse charges properly, transferred abusive priests rather than
punishing them as well as failed to pay adequate compensation to victims.
The panel of 10 independent experts called on the Holy See to
cooperate in prosecuting all cases of suspected abuse, adding that all cases of
suspected sexual abuse must be referred to authorities for investigation.
The UN committee also asked the Vatican to stop protecting
suspected priests and immediately suspend them, urging the Holy See to
establish an independent complaints mechanism for possible victims of abuse
over the past decades.
Victims accuse Roman Catholic authorities of protecting abusive
clerics and of ignoring their complaints.
The criticism follows the UN committee’s public grilling of
Vatican officials during a hearing earlier this month in Geneva and it is the
second time in three months a UN human rights body has slammed the Vatican over
its handling of sexual abuse of minors by priests.
In January, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child denounced
the Vatican for adopting policies allowing priests to rape and molest tens of
thousands of children.
The committee also blasted the Vatican’s practice of transferring
the abusing clergymen from parish to parish in a bid to cover up their crimes.
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