Success in Campaign Against Pope Unlikely

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article7096516.ece

Julian B. Knowles explains why the campaign to arrest the Pope is unlikely to succeed:

“Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain in September has prompted the atheist Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to announce that they will apply for an arrest warrant over the sex abuse scandals involving priests.
Those who are serious about procuring an arrest generally do not announce their intentions months ahead but this case follows the recent trend of activists using warrants as a publicity stunt.

So what are Dawkins and Hitchens’ chances of getting their warrant ?
The first problem is that the Pope is a head of state and is entitled to complete criminal and civil immunity under customary international law and the State Immunity Act 1978. Hitchens and Dawkins and their lawyers have suggested that the Vatican is not a state under international law, but their view is not supported by
When international law began to grow among the states, the Pope was the monarch of one of those states — the Papal states. In 1870 Italy annexed the Papal states and it had to create a position for the Pope and the Holy See (that is, the episcopal jurisdiction of the Church in Rome) that reflected the Pope’s importance as head of the Catholic Church.

In 1871 the Law of Guarantees was enacted by the Italian parliament, which explicitly recognised the Pope’s person to be sacred and inviolable, and that any insult or injury to the Pope was to be regarded as an insult or injury to a king’s person. The international position of the Holy See was clarified by the Lateran Treaty in 1929. In it Italy acknowledged the sovereignty of the Holy See in international matters and recognised the statehood of the Vatican City under the sovereignty of the Pope. Oppenheim’s International Law (8th edn, p327-328) comments that the Lateran Treaty marked the Holy See’s formal membership in the society of states. The authors conclude that the Vatican City and the Holy See constitute a state possessing the formal requirements of statehood constituting an international person recognised as such by other states.

The second problem facing the pair is the absence of any crime that would be justiciable in the English courts. They have been noticeably coy about specifying any offence that the Pope may have committed that a court in the UK could try, which tends to suggest that there isn’t one. With certain limited exceptions the English criminal law concerns itself only with matters occurring in the UK, and so far no one has identified any offence over which the criminal courts here would have jurisdiction.

Thus while Dawkins and Hitchens have succeeded in generating interest for their agenda, it is highly unlikely that their application for a warrant will meet with similar success. “

Personally, I would never expect an attempt to arrest the Pope to work no matter what the crime, that the idea has been considered at all is what’s amazing. It sends a strong message that there are those will not idle by while a man remains immune from his own actions due to his title.