Prosecuting the Pope for Crimes Against Humanity

Chain The Dogma

Prosecuting the Pope for Crimes Against Humanity

If the systemic rape and abuse of children is not a crime against humanity, then what is?

by Perry Bulwer


A complaint recently filed  with the International Criminal Court (ICC) asking it to investigate crimes against humanity by Pope Benedict and three top Vatican officials faces some hurdles, but as a last resort it is a creative legal strategy. As Barbara Blaine, president of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), which initiated the complaint, stated:

We have tried everything we could think of to get them to stop and they won’t. If the Pope wanted to, he could take dramatic action at any time that would help protect children today and in the future, and he refuses to take the action.

Catholic apologists will take issue with that statement and insist the Pope personally, and the church in general, has taken action to protect children, but considering the actions taken in the U.S. and Ireland in that regard they are clearly insufficient, ineffectual, and undermined by the deception of bishops and directives from the Vatican. Long before Benedict became Pope,  he was well aware, as was his predecessor John Paul II,  that clergy sex crimes against children was an on-going problem for decades. But instead of doing the moral thing to protect children by exposing and reporting crimes by priests, Vatican policies were intended to protect the church by covering up abuses and transferring criminal priests to other parishes or countries, which led to many more children needlessly abused because of that institutional neglect and deception. That is the basis of the complaint to the ICC, as explained by Pam Spees, attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR),  which filed the complaint along with SNAP:

The Vatican officials charged in this case are responsible for rape and other sexual violence and for the physical and psychological torture of victims around the world both through command responsibility and through direct cover up of crimes. They should be brought to trial like any other officials guilty of crimes against humanity.

However, given some of the legal obstacles the complaint must overcome before the ICC agrees to take on the case, Spees "conceded she was “not hopeful” the court would launch an investigation." That does not mean the complaint has no chance. There are various arguments that can be made to overcome some of the obstacles that might prevent the ICC from taking the case. Herman van der Wilt, professor of international law at Amsterdam University, identified two reasons why he thought the complaint does not stand much chance: crimes against humanity must be perpetrated by a State or state-like organization, and the ICC has no mandate to investigate crimes committed before July 1, 2002.

As a professor of international law, van der Wilt is probably smarter and more knowledgeable than I am on the subject, but it seems to me that the Holy See, which "refers to the composite of the authority, jurisdiction, and sovereignty vested in the Pope and his advisers to direct the worldwide Roman Catholic Church", does have international recognition as a sovereign state.

So too does Vatican City,  which meets all eight criteria  used to define an independent country. By that definition, Vatican City is also a sovereign State,  so either way the systemic crimes against children within the Church do qualify as crimes against humanity committed by a State, so I'm not really sure what the professor was thinking on that issue.

As for the obstacle of time, the fact that many of those crimes occurred before the ICC's mandate began in 2002 is a tougher one to overcome, but not impossible. Civil statutory time limitations for initiating sexual abuse claims  have worked mostly to protect the Catholic church from lawsuits, while denying victims justice. However, courts have sometimes suspended those time limitations temporarily in some jurisdictions to allow victims to sue within a specified period, or ruled them invalid in the case of some individuals with special circumstances. I am not suggesting the ICC has a mechanism for overcoming its prohibition against investigating crimes prior to 2002, just that clever arguments can be made to overcome that prohibition.

The scandal in Philadelphia  comes to mind as an example of how clergy crimes that occurred before 2002 could still be investigated by the ICC, indirectly. A grand jury report details how the Philadelphia Archdiocese allowed 37 priests credibly accused of child abuse to remain in ministry, and failed to inform the local and national review boards set up by the U.S. bishops to help keep them accountable. The head of the Philadelphia review board, Ana Maria Catanzaro,  said the archdiocese pre-screened which cases they reviewed, hiding problem priests, because it was more concerned about lawsuits and liability than protecting children. Although many of the crimes committed by those 37 priests occurred before 2002, the cover-up and neglect by Cardinals and Bishops continued long past 2002. In my opinion, the prohibition against pre-2002 investigations can be overcome with that or similar arguments. Besides, there are many cases after 2002 that the ICC could investigate.

The covering up of crimes by Bishops and Cardinals is a fairly straightforward argument to make with plenty of evidence to back it up. Certainly, the 20,000 pages of documents CCR lawyers submitted to the ICC to support their complaint contain some of that evidence. The other basis of the complaint is that the Pope and the other officials named in it had command responsibility, meaning that they are responsible for the crimes of their subordinates. Command responsibility has been used mostly in war crimes cases, since it is usually applied to organized groups like military, para-military or police units where there is an obvious chain of command. However, command responsibility can also be applied to a civilian state organization and the CCR lawyers have done an excellent job making the case that the Pope and the other church leaders are responsible for the systemic crimes against humanity committed by priests around the world. If you are not convinced, I urge you to read the full complaint and decide based on the evidence of horrific crimes provided within it whether or not you agree with Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican's U.S. lawyer who called the complaint a “ludicrous publicity stunt and a misuse of international judicial processes.” That is typical of statements by Catholic spokespersons and apologists, whether lawyers, church officials, or laypersons. But what is more ludicrous, abuse survivors and advocates fighting anyway they can to protect children and hold perpetrators and their enablers accountable to civil and criminal law, or spokespersons for a church that claims to be the moral authority for the world denigrating those survivors of horrific spiritual and physical abuse by priests, who represented God to them, as nothing more than publicity seekers? 

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Rogue Cops: a few bad apples or a rotten barrel?

Chain The Dogma    August 23, 2011

Rogue Cops: a few bad apples or a rotten barrel?

The shocking cruelty of police towards a serial killer's rape victim

by Perry Bulwer

Last week I started watching the TV series, The Wire. Yes, I know I'm several years late, but that's how I watch TV these days. I wait for a series to conclude, then obtain the entire series to view at my leisure rather than conforming to broadcast schedules. It is also much easier to remember characters and plot lines from episode to episode and season to season that way. So far I've only watched the first four episodes of season one, but even though those episodes aired in 2004 they still seem freshly ripped from today's headlines.

I am thinking particularly of the depiction of incompetent, violent police officers and their corrupt superiors. Of course, such depictions are nothing new, corrupt cops being a popular Hollywood trope, but the real rogues are often worse than those fictional ones. The Rodney King incident in 1991 helped illustrate that fact in a way that was impossible for the police to cover-up. Police brutality and abuse of authority are as old as policing itself, of course, but until the advent of video technology they always had a way to cover up their crimes through collusion. They still do that today, but it is much harder when there is video evidence often taken by witnesses. That type of evidence of police brutality has greatly increased now that most citizens carry cell phone cameras with them. However, instead of dealing with the problem of rogue cops who abuse their powers, law enforcement officials seem determined to criminalize filming police in public places.

What's good for the police apparently isn't good for the people -- or so the law enforcement community would have us believe when it comes to surveillance.

That's a concise summary of a new trend first reported by National Public Radio last week -- the trend whereby law enforcement officials have been trying to prevent civilians from using cellphone cameras in public places as a means of deterring police brutality.

Oddly, the effort -- which employs both forcible arrests of videographers and legal proceedings against them -- comes at a time when the American Civil Liberties Union reports that "an increasing number of American cities and towns are investing millions of taxpayer dollars in surveillance camera systems."

Then again, maybe it's not odd that the two trends are happening simultaneously. Maybe they go hand in hand. Perhaps as more police officers use cameras to monitor every move we make, they are discovering the true power of video to independently document events. And as they see that power, they don't want it turned against them.

...

Law enforcement officials, of course, don't like the cellphone cameras because they don't want any check on police power. So they've resorted to fear-mongering allegations about lost lives. But the only police officers who are threatened by cellphone cameras are those who want to break civil liberties laws with impunity. The rest have nothing to worry about and everything to gain from a practice that simply asks them to remember the all-too-forgotten part of their "protect and serve" motto -- the part about protecting the public's civil rights.

In some jurisdictions, such as California, the law already shields violent police officers. Here's an excerpt from a recent investigative report  there:

March 21, 2009, was one of the bloodiest days in the history of the Oakland Police Department and California law enforcement.

...

[Sgt. Patrick] Gonzales would emerge from the day’s dramatic violence as a department hero; some colleagues nicknamed him “Audie Murphy,” the most decorated American soldier of World War II. But to many in the black and Latino neighborhoods Gonzales polices today, he has long been known as something else: a loose cannon. During Gonzales’ 13-year career he has shot four suspects, three fatally. “He’s left a trail of victims in his wake,” says Cathy King, the mother of one of Gonzales’ shooting victims, “but he’s [considered] a valued member of the police department.”

Multiple lawsuits alleging wrongful death, excessive force, illegal searches and racial profiling incidents involving Gonzales have resulted in $3.6 million paid by the city in settlement money. Law enforcement experts say he fits the profile of the “bad apple” minority in OPD that is responsible for most of the allegations of brutality that plague its relationship with the city’s communities of color. And the Board of Inquiry report on the bloody events of March 21, 2009, places significant blame for the carnage on Gonzales’ decisions.

Yet, Gonzales has been consistently promoted and deployed into sensitive situations throughout his career, and without public outcry. That’s because few know about either his record or his promotions. His extensive personnel file is today off-limits to the public, thanks to a dramatic rollback in the transparency of law enforcement records following a California Supreme Court ruling five years ago. The 2006 decision, in Copley Press v. Superior Court of San Diego, effectively classified all records of individual law enforcement officers, even those employed by contractors.

The arc of Gonzales’ career, from a patrol officer in the Eastlake neighborhood to a sergeant on the SWAT team at the heart of one of OPD’s darkest days, tells the story of a department’s broken accountability system, now pushed behind a wall of secrecy.

I do not buy the "bad apple" argument. If Gonzales was merely a bad apple, why did he keep getting promoted? If he was a bad apple, so were his superiors, which suggests the entire barrel was rotten. There are just too many cases of police misconduct (I'm referring to the U.S. and Canada) for it to be a matter of a few corrupt cops. The problem is rooted in police culture and training. I do not know how else to explain the brutal behaviour of Ontario police towards a woman bound, beat and raped by a serial killer.

A woman who was bound and sexually assaulted by her then-neighbour, Col. Russell Williams, says the police left her tied up for five hours after responding to her 911 call.

Laurie Massicotte says Ontario Provincial Police officers told her they had to leave her in the harness, fashioned by Williams, until an OPP photographer arrived to take pictures of her in the restraint.

"I was left for five hours, still in my harness, still tied up, naked, lying under a comforter," Massicotte, 47, told the Ottawa Citizen in a telephone interview Friday.

"Five hours, no medical attention. I was in total shock. I didn't know what the heck was going on."

The OPP, she said, treated her like a criminal in the early hours of the investigation.

One officer told her neighbour, Massicotte said, that police suspected she was trying to "copycat" what happened to another sexual assault victim in Tweed, Ont., 12 days earlier.

"It was really, really, really bad," she said.

...

Massicotte was blindfolded and bound. Her clothes were cut from her with a knife. She was forced to pose while Williams took photos.

The ordeal lasted 3 1/2 hours. Williams left her in a makeshift straitjacket — her arms were cinched to her sides — but she still managed to dial 911.

The police told her she would have to stay in the restraint until the ident unit arrived. When photos were finally taken five hours later, Massicotte said she was then allowed to put on a bathrobe, and taken outside for three more hours while police combed her house for evidence.

She went through a lengthy interrogation before an OPP officer "finally confessed to me that this similar situation happened 12 days ago and we didn't warn anybody about it."

After the incident, Massicotte said she felt violated and terrorized by Williams — and "betrayed" by the police. She said she now suffers from post-traumatic stress and anxiety.

To recap, Laurie was tied up, beaten, and raped for 3 1/2 hours by a serial rapist and killer. When police arrived an obviously traumatized Laurie was left naked and tied up for 5 more hours because they did not believe she was a victim, but instead thought she was a criminal. Then when they finally untied her she was forced to wait another 3 hours outside while police continued their investigation. So, her rapist abused her for 3 1/2 hours, but the police abused her for 8 hours. But that was not the final indignity. Not only did the police think she was faking her own assault, they had failed to warn her that a similar attack had occurred just two weeks earlier. That failure in their duty of care to Laurie will be one of the claims in her lawsuit against the police force.

So, is that a case of a few bad cops, or an indication of a systemic failure in police training and oversight? Could those police officers really not tell the difference between a traumatized sex assault victim in shock and someone merely pretending to be? Are they trained to assume everyone they deal with is a criminal until they can prove otherwise? It certainly seems so, as the Robert Dziekański  case suggests. He was the innocent Polish man killed by police tasers in the Vancouver airport. They then tried to cover up what they did by giving false evidence. It was not just the four RCMP officers involved who colluded on their evidence and tried to mislead the investigation and inquiry. An RCMP spokesperson gave a false version of events to the public before anyone was aware that a witness had taken a video of the incident. No wonder police departments want to criminalize filming the police.

Post Script: I continued this theme of police misconduct in the blog post  "Sexual harassment in the RCMP and the failure to catch a serial killer" at the first link below.

  

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