02 Jan Vatican Will No Longer Automatically Accept International Law
I guess what surprises me is that the Vatican ever did have a rule of automatically adhering to international law. But as of yesterday, that rule, along with the rule automatically adopting Italian law as part of its internal legal order, is history.
The Vatican has [] decided to scrutinise international treaties before deciding whether or not to adhere to them.
It has recently refused to approve a United Nations declaration decriminalising homosexuality.
The wording went too far, Vatican officials said, in placing different sexual orientations on the same level.
Some legal observers believe that the Vatican is simply trying to assert its legal independence in cases involving for example, civil unions, divorce, living wills, or euthanasia.
If Italy were to legalise same sex marriages or euthanasia, for example, the Vatican would now be able to refuse to recognise that.
Considering that the thrust of the BBC article you link to is about the automatic acceptance of Italian law by the Vatican, could it be that the somewhat oblique reference to international treaties likewise refers to a decision by the Vatican not to automatically accept all such treaties as Italy may have seen fit to ratify? After all, treaties ratified by Italy seem to become part of Italian domestic law (see Art. 80 of the Constitution), so any rule or practice by which the Vatican automatically accepts Italian law would seem to extend to international treaty law adopted by Italy. Once that rule or practice is abolished, it would then make sense to add, if only by way of clarification, that the Vatican’s scrutiny of Italian law before adoption for the Vatican applies also to Italian legislation based on international treaties. I tend to think this construction makes a good deal more sense than the understanding according to which the Vatican used to cotton on to just any treaty out there. Like you, I very much doubt it did; no State does. The Vatican and the Holy See – distinct entities – have become parties to international treaties in the… Read more »
There is a short overview of the Vatican City State’s legal system, written by Stephen Young and Alison Shea, on the NYU’s GlobaLex website: “Researching the law of the Vatican City State” (2007), at http://www.nyulawglobal.org/Globalex/Vatican.htm As it is clear from the article, even prior to the Vatican statement reported by the BBC, there was a “filter” between the Vatican legal system and Italian legislation: Italian laws were neither automatically accepted, nor applied, in the Vatican City State as a whole, but only as a supplementary source of law, subject to the condition that they did not conflict “with canon law, the rules of the Lateran Treaty (and, later, the 1984 Concordat), or divine law” (point 2.B of the article). See especially point 3.A of the article: “Under article 3 of the Law of the Sources of the Law, provision is made for the supplementary application of the “laws promulgated by the Kingdom of Italy.” Article 3 also calls for the application of “the general regulations and local regulations of the province and government of Rome.” Although secondary to the laws of the Supreme Pontiff and the Code of Canon Law, much of the work conducted by the judicial organs of… Read more »