Arrest the Pope

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/64054

The Pope should be arrested. Two “prominent atheists” are leading the charge:
“Two prominent atheists have hired lawyers to investigate the possibility of having Pope Benedict XVI arrested for “crimes against humanity,” British media reported Sunday.

Accusing the Pope covering up clerical sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens want lawyers to build a case for his arrest when he visits Britain later this year to beatify a 19th century British theologian.

“This man is not above or outside the law,” Hitchens told the London Times. “The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded pay-offs, but justice and punishment.”

A senior Vatican legal official, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, earlier told an Italian newspaper that the Pope enjoyed diplomatic immunity as head of state. He was responding at the time to calls by some lawyers representing abuse victims, wanting the Pope to testify.

The move in Britain goes much further, seeking to have the head of the Roman Catholic Church appear not just as a witness but as an accused in a criminal or civil case.

“There is every possibility of legal action against the Pope occurring,” Mark Stephens, one of the lawyers hired by the two campaigning atheists, told the Daily Telegraph.

The other lawyer, human rights activist Geoffrey Robertson, earlier this month published an article challenging the Vatican’s claim to sovereignty – and hence immunity for the Pope as head of a sovereign state – noting that while the United Nations afforded the Vatican a unique special status, it has never agreed to granting it membership.

Robertson said the sovereignty/immunity claim could be challenged in British courts and in the European Court of Human Rights.

An alternative course of action would be to go the International Criminal Court (ICC) route, where immunity would provide no protection.

Robertson laid out circumstances in which he said the Pope could be tried in the ICC. In the tribunal’s founding statute, the definition of a crime against humanity “includes rape and sexual slavery and other similarly inhumane acts causing harm to mental or physical health, committed against civilians on a widespread or systematic scale, if condoned by a government or a de facto authority.”

“If acts of sexual abuse by priests are not isolated or sporadic, but part of a wide practice both known to and unpunished by their de facto authority then they fall within the temporal jurisdiction of the ICC – if that practice continued after July 2002, when the court was established.”

The Pope is scheduled to visit Britain in mid September to beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, and Dawkins and Hitchens want to see him arrested while in the country.

Last year a British judge issued a warrant for the arrest of then Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, at the behest of Palestinian activists. Livni as a result canceled a scheduled visit to the country.

In the late 1990s, former Chilean military ruler Augusto Pinochet was arrested in Britain and spent more than 16 months under house arrest because four countries – Spain, Belgium, Switzerland and France – had issued warrants for his arrest for allegedly torturing political opponents during his 17-year rule.

The British government eventually released the then 84-year-old, saying he was medically unfit to stand trial and so would not be extradited to one of the four European countries.

At the time, even though Pinochet did not stand trial, Robertson hailed the case as an important precedent.”
I wouldn’t count on this to succeed. Regardless, it’s symbolically powerful.