Catholics threaten Vatican with UN censure on abuse

The Vatican was accused yesterday of orchestrating a cover-up of the scale of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Its critics demanded the United Nations censure the Vatican unless it did more to protect children from such abuse.

A coalition of campaigners, lawyers and victims of sexual abuse will meet members of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child today in Geneva to argue that the Vatican has violated a 1989 resolution to protect children. The coalition, headed by the US-based group, Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC), says the problem is global and the Vatican must issue a full report on what is being done to address the issue.

The allegations against the Vatican are in a 40-page report yesterday from CFFC, detailing 5,000 cases of alleged abuse committed by members of the clergy in more than 20 countries, including Australia, Poland, Austria and several in Latin America, with some complaints dating from the Forties.

The scandal has had its biggest impact in the United States, with floods of allegations emerging in the past year. In January, documents revealed that the Boston archdiocese reassigned priests accused of molesting children to other dioceses without warning anyone.

The scandal led to the dismissal of 300 priests. Now new rules say a bishop should dismiss a cleric "of any ecclesiastical ministry or function" if there is a "credible" accusation of sexual abuse of a minor.

Frances Kissling, the CFFC president, said: "There has been cover-up and collusion, not only on the part of the bishops, but by the Vatican. This report shows sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is not an American crisis, it is global."

Ms Kissling, whose group has long called for the Vatican to lose its permanent observer status at the UN, said she felt the UN had a "moral authority" that could force the Vatican to act. "We know the UN can do very little in the world ... It's an institution with minimal enforcement power," she said.

The group claims the Vatican has violated the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by failing to protect children from known abusers through negligence and inaction. When the delegations meet the UN committee today they will ask it to press the Vatican to submit a full report on the global scope of the problem, with a plan of action on how to deal with it.

Ms Kissling said that if the Vatican did not respond, she would consider asking committee members to censure the Holy See, a tactic used by the UN Human Rights Commission for Cuba and China.

The coalition also demanded the Pope himself apologise to the victims for the abuse.

This week, the Vatican is to release a response to proposals from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on tackling abuse. The plans call for dioceses to remove all guilty priests from church work, and, in some cases, from the priesthood.

Yesterday, the Reverend James Reinert, a spokesman for the Holy See's mission at the UN headquarters, said the Vatican was doing what it could. He said he had not seen the details of the CFFC report, and added: "I don't pay attention to what [CFFC] is doing."