13 Apr Even More on Legal Action Against the Pope: It Looks Like It Will Happen
Another day, another chance for folks in the UK to make threats about bringing legal action against the Pope during his upcoming September visit to the UK. The latest attack comes from noted atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. It looks like the focus will be on breaking down the Pope’s head-of-state immunity defense, rather than trying to fit the sex abuse into the category of crimes against humanity. I think even this argument is very shaky, and wouldn’t fly in the U.S. because courts would give absolute deference to the executive branch’s decision to recognize the Vatican as a state, and the Pope as the head of state. But these UK lawyers are serious, they have real money behind them, so legal action will likely happen. Will the Pope take the chance and visit anyway?
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are paying lawyers to investigate whether Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested when he visits Britain in September.
Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens believe the Pope should face charges for the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, The Guardian reports.
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Mark Stephens, a lawyer for Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens, says only those with UN protection are safe.
“The Vatican is not recognised as a state in international law. People assume that it has existed for time immemorial but it was a construct of [Italian wartime leader Benito] Mussolini and, when the Vatican first applied to become a member of the UN, the US said no,” Mr Stephens told The Guardian.
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“[Fellow lawyer Geoffrey Robertson] and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature.”
This is based on the original Sunday Time article that claimed Dawkins was planning to arrest the Pope when he arrived in the UK. Dawkins put out this statement: “Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself. What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horme, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article here: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5341 Here is what really happened. Christopher Hitchens first proposed the legal challenge idea to me on March 14th. I responded enthusiastically, and suggested the name of a high profile human rights lawyer whom I know. I had lost her address, however, and set about tracking her down. Meanwhile, Christopher made… Read more »
Note that Pope Gregory XIII claimed extraterritorial jurisdiction over England in declaring Queen Elizabeth I to be a usurper and sending various armies and assassins to kill her. Turnabout?
I think this is a media story, nothing more. The UK doesn’t have jurisdiction over non-residents for crimes against humanity – we don’t have ‘true’ universal jurisdiction. So I think this fails at the first hurdle – regardless of immunity questions, whether the acts qualify as crimes against humanity, and whether the UK Director of Public Prosecutions and Attorney General would agree that such a prosecution would pass the public interest test. Myself I suspect that the answer to the last 3 hurdles are a) he’d be considered immune, b) doubtful, c) never.
Just FYI, Dapo Akande has put up a detailed post on the Pope’s immunity issue:
http://www.ejiltalk.org/can-the-pope-be-arrested-in-connection-with-the-sexual-abuse-scandal/
Again, I see no scenario in which legal action against the Pope would have any reasonable prospect of success. It might, however, prove to be a useful PR exercise, which I suspect it is all about anyway.