The untouchable Vatican.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday dismissed 24 plaintiffs who wanted to prosecute the Vatican for acts of child criminality committed by Catholic priests.

The Court, which spoke for the first time on this subject, justified its decision by highlighting in particular the “immunity” of the Holy See recognized by “principles of international law”.

The applicants, of Belgian, French and Dutch nationality, had already been dismissed by the Belgian courts which had already invoked this "immunity from jurisdiction" of the Vatican.

Before the ECHR, they therefore sued Belgium, believing that the rejection of their civil action had prevented them from asserting their grievances against the Vatican.

A non-member country of the Council of Europe, therefore outside the scope of the European Court, the Holy See was not directly concerned by the procedure before the ECHR, the legal arm of the Council.

The Belgian Episcopal Conference and the Vatican had, however, been authorized to intervene in the written procedure as third party interveners.

An “anything but surprising” decision

In a fairly technical judgment, the ECHR ruled in favor of the Belgian courts.

“The Court judges that the rejection (…) did not deviate from the principles of international law generally recognized in matters of State immunity” and which apply to the Vatican, she noted in a press release.

"With regard to case law (...) and international law", this decision "is anything but surprising", considered in a tweet Nicolas Hervieu, specialist in European law.

"But this is the first time that the European Court had to assess the question of the immunity of the Holy See", in particular on "acts of sexual abuse of children", he noted.

The court, which sits in Strasbourg, found that there had been no violation of the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights on the “right of access to a court”, invoked by the applicants.

Bad "procedural choices"

In 2011, they brought a collective action in Belgium for compensation against the Vatican, leaders of the Belgian Catholic Church and Catholic associations, after the scandal caused by the revelations of the bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, who had confessed in 2010 pedophile acts and resigned.

The applicants sought compensation because of "the damage caused by the structurally deficient way in which the Church would have faced the problem of sexual abuse within it", recalls the ECHR.

The Vatican "has characteristics comparable to those of a state", continue the European judges, according to which Belgian justice was entitled to "deduce from these characteristics that the Holy See was a foreign sovereign, with the same rights and obligations. than a State ”. “The total failure of the applicants' action” before the Belgian courts “actually results” from bad “procedural choices” that they “did not change” during the procedure, concludes the Court. Twenty applicants were however able to benefit from compensation from the Belgian “center for arbitration in matters of sexual abuse of the Catholic Church”, recalls the ECHR.

This decision comes a few days after the publication of the work of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (Ciase) in France, which estimated at 216,000 the number of people victims of a priest or a religious for years. 1950, or even 330,000 if we add lay aggressors in connection with the institutions of the Church.

Pope Francis expressed "his shame" after the publication of this report.

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  • Belgium

  • Religion

  • Complaint

  • Church

  • Vatican

  • Justice

  • Pedocriminality

  • Europe

  • Cedh

  • Human rights