The Holy See will be grilled on Thursday, January 16, by a UN committee in Geneva about the Vatican's lack of reports on child sex abuse cases worldwide, according to a report by the Associated Press.
For the first time, the Holy See will be forced to publicly defend itself against allegations of sex child abuse.
The UN committee in Geneva will ask Vatican representatives why the Holy See enabled the rape of thousands of children, while protecting pedophile priests. It will grill the Church on the grounds of how - if ever it did - it implemented the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which among other things, calls for appropriate measures to protect children from harm, the report said.
In 1990, the Holy See ratified the UN convention and submitted its first implementation in 1994. However, it didn't submit any progress reports for nearly 20 years. The Vatican has only submitted on report in 2012 after it was heavily criticized over child sex abuse scandal in Europe and the rest of the world in 2010.
"For too many years, survivors were the only ones speaking out about this and bearing the brunt of a lot of criticism," Pam Spees, a human rights attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provided a key report to the committee, told MSN News. "And so this is a very important moment for many, many people who are here in Geneva and around the world who will be watching as the Holy See is called for the first time ever to actually answer questions."
Various victims groups and human rights organizations worldwide rallied together to put pressure on the U.N. committee to challenge the Holy See on its abuse record. The groups and organizations provided written testimony from victims and evidence outlining the global scale of the problem. Their reports cited case studies in Mexico and Britain, grand jury investigations in the U.S., and government fact-finding inquiries from Canada to Ireland to Australia. The case studies provided details how Vatican policies and its culture of secrecy together with a fear of scandal contributed to the problem.
Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's chief sex crimes prosecutor, will represent the Holy See on Thursday, Jan. 16.
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