The federal government(of Australia) has told a UN committee it is up to Australia’s child sex abuse royal commission to get the Vatican to hand over documents about paedophile priests.
Vice chair of the UN Committee Against Torture, Felice Gaer, had queried on Monday whether the Australian government’s refusal to investigate perpetrators of child abuse was “compliant or wilfully inactive”.
The committee sitting to review Australia’s record as a signatory to the Convention Against Torture has received submissions from non-government organisations including two from networks representing Australian survivors of institutional and clerical child sex abuse.
Gaer asked specifically what action the government had taken when Cardinal George Pell told a royal commission it was unreasonable to ask the Vatican to hand over all documents relevant to sex abuse by priests in Australia.
In August the cardinal told a public hearing of the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in Melbourne that Vatican documents on specific cases would be and had been supplied but it was not appropriate to hand them all over as they were the private internal documents of a sovereign state – the Holy See.
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