The U.N can't point fingers when it comes to sexual misconduct: Report by James Varney

Kirsten Sandberg, center, chairperson of the U.N. human rights committee on the rights of the child, gestures as she joins committee members Maria Herczog, right, and Benyam Mezmur, left, for a press conference at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Feb. 5. A U.N. human rights committee denounced the Vatican on Wednesday for adopting policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of children over decades, and urged it to open its files on the pedophiles and the churchmen who concealed their crimes. (AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus)

THE UNITED NATION CAN'T POINT FINGERS WHEN IT COMES TO SEXUAL MISCONDUCT:

REPORT BY JAMES VARNEY

The widespread sexual abuse of boys by Roman Catholic priests is one of those astounding stories, an injustice so monstrous and rooted in a network so rich and deep it would seem confined to Hollywood screenwriters. It's all too real, though, and horrible.

The light that has been shone on the church in terms of what it knew and tolerated for decades, along with steps it took to bury accusers and escape judgment for its crimes, has been a good thing. Perhaps the only troubling aspect of it is how much the spotlight has been focused on the United States.

This isn't an American problem; this is a Roman Catholic Church problem, and Rome and its officers are a global presence.

Nevertheless, if there were one entity singularly unqualified to investigate the Church's sexual abuse problems it would be the United Nations. Not only because the U.N. is such an intellectually dishonest and government-scrubbing, self-aggrandizing collection of arrogant diplomats, but because when it comes to sex crimes the U.N. itself is a major perpetrator.

Monday in Geneva, the U.N. Committee Against Torture is essentially putting the Vatican in the dock, barely three months after the U.N.'s Committee on the Rights of the Child scored the Roman Catholic Church for its sexual abuse scandal and its handling of the tragic, criminal behavior.

Some writers and Catholic leaders have warned against the U.N.'s political agenda and questioned whether the U.N. can be seen as any sort of impartial judge of the Vatican's actions. Those are valid questions, but surprisingly absent from much of the recent discussion has been any consideration of why the U.N. would have any moral standing at all when it comes to sex crimes.

In Africa, U.N. peacekeeping forces engaged in waves of rape perhaps unequaled since the Red Army swept across Eastern Europe into Berlin in 1945. An internal U.N. report on the matter in 2004 also found widespread problems with forced prostitution and pedophilia, according to The Washington Post.

These followed similar felonious sexual behavior by U.N. police crews in Bosnia and Cambodia, a timeline and pattern that suggests the U.N. has nothing to recommend when it comes to combating something Pope Francis has labeled "evil," namely the sexual exploitation of children.

It should be said that unlike some U.N. committees the one dealing with torture doesn't have a laughable lineup. Italy, Denmark, Mauritius are three with pretty clean modern rap sheets, and although the U.S. has kept open that hideous torture multiplex at Guantanamo and performed some of the same dubious moves on prisoners it forces its own elite forces to undergo in training, I'm at least as comfortable with the American track record as I am with China's or Chile's.

The point is, it's not like having Iran or Zimbabwe or Thailand on a committee discussing the status of women.

Nevertheless, the U.N. is a glassy house when it comes to poking around in the Vatican's inexcusably lax and self-saving attitude toward predatory priests in its mix. The U.N. lacks the moral authority to pull this off. Rather than eye one another warily in Geneva, perhaps both famous institutions would be better off getting their affairs in order back in Rome or Turtle Bay.

 Report by James Varney: on May 05, 2014 at 3:41 PM, updated May 05, 2014 at 3:52 PM at www.nola.com

Pot. Kettle. Black: U.N. grills Vatican over sex

(Pope Francis meets with U.N. officials in March 2013)

POT. KETTLE. BLACK: U.N. GRILLS VATICAN OVER SEX

UNITED NATIONS – Last Thursday in Geneva a panel from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in a open hearing televised live on the Internet, grilled Vatican officials over the handling of cases of sex abuse by clergy, while neglecting to reference the many different sex scandals involving United Nations personnel that have plagued the organization for decades.

Bishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican official responsible for prosecuting clergy accused of sex crimes over 10 years, from 2002 until 2012, explained to the United Nations panel that it is not the policy of the Holy See to cover up sex crimes committed by the clergy. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi cautioned the United Nations panel that the legal jurisdiction of the Vatican to punish clergy criminally was often trumped by criminal laws within the jurisdiction in which the accused clergy resided.

The Vatican ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, but did not submit any reports until 2012, when the Vatican reported it was aware of 612 new cases of sexual abuse charges in 2012, 418 of which involved minors. Since the 1970s, sex abuse scandals involving clergy have cost the Vatican a loss of credibility across the globe, with accusations the Holy See’s reaction until recently has been to shuffle the accused clergy to another diocese or assignment in an effort to cover up rather than prosecute the crime.

Pope Francis copes with sex-abuse scandal

In December 2013, after refusing a United Nations request for information on alleged sexual abuse cases involving the clergy, Pope Francis announced through Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, the decision by the Vatican to set up a child sex-abuse committee involving a panel of experts charged with producing guidelines of conduct for Catholic clergy and church officials.

In 2002, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, then the archbishop of Boston, was forced to resign after accusations of sexual misconduct by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston. The resignation was triggered by particularly sensational accusations of child molestation involving Father John Geoghan tracing back to 1984 that resulted in Geoghan’s criminal conviction for indecent assault and battery on a 10 years old boy.

Pope Francis raised further questions about the Vatican’s sincerity in prosecuting clergy accused of sex abuse when Law was given an appointment as archpriest at the prestigious Basilica of St. Maria Major in Rome. Last Thursday, however, in a particularly blunt homily delivered at a Vatican Mass, Pope Francis explained scandals in the Catholic Church happen because there is no living relationship with God and his Word, thus corrupt priests, instead of giving “the Bread of Life,” give a poisoned message to the faithful.

“But are we ashamed?” Pope Francis asked in the homily broadcast by Vatican Radio. “So many scandals that I do not want to mention individually, but all of us know … we know where they are! Scandals, some who charged a lot of money [to] the shame of the Church! But are we all ashamed of those scandals, of those failings of priests, bishops, laity? Where was the Word of God in those scandals; where was the Word of God in those men and in those women? They did not have a relationship with God! They had a position in the Church, a position of power, even of comfort. But the Word of God, no!”

On Friday, the Associated Press reported Pope Benedict XVI defrocked nearly 400 priests in 2011 and 2012 for molesting children.

In a document prepared for release to the U.N., the Vatican confirmed a dramatic increase over the 171 priests removed in 2008 and 2009 for alleged sexual abuse. The AP acknowledged “a remarkable evolution in the Holy See’s in-house procedures to discipline pedophiles since 2001,” when then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [subsequently elected Pope Benedict XVI] ordered bishops to send to Rome for review all cases of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse.

Et tu, United Nations?

Yet even as the Vatican is making strides to explain to the U.N. its efforts to clean house of sexual abuse, the international body headquartered in New York has its own skeletons in the closet. On March 13, 2005, for example, Washington Post staff writer Colum Lynch reported “a culture of sexual permissiveness” has plagued U.N. peacekeeping operations worldwide for the past 12 years. “The reports of sexual abuse have come from U.N. officials, internal U.N. documents and local and international human rights organizations that have tracked the issue,” Lynch wrote. “Some U.N. officials and outside observers say there have been cases of abuse in almost every U.N. mission, including operations in Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone and Kosovo.”

On May 8, 2006, the BBC reported a widespread scandal in which UN peacekeepers were demanding “sex for aid” from girls as young as 08 years old in Liberia. In 2008, an international scandal developed when U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti were involved in gang-rape charges in the Ivory Coast, and in 2011, Uruguayan President Jose Mujica apologized to Haitian President Michel Martelly over the alleged rape of an 18-year-old Haitian man by Uruguayan U.N. peacekeeping troops then in Haiti. Despite a U.N. “zero tolerance” policy toward sexual abuse announced in 2003, the U.N. has focused serious attention on addressing sex crimes among more than 120,000 personnel deployed in 16 different peacekeeping missions globally, the New York Times reported in 2011.

“What do we do when those we entrust with our greatest hopes betray that trust?” asked Gerald Caplan writing in The Globe and Mail published in Canada on Aug. 3, 2012. “If the betrayers are United Nations peacekeepers, the answer seems to be nothing at all. There is distressing new evidence, most of it reported here for the first time, that foreign soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo can sexually and violently violate young girls with impunity so long as they wear that iconic blue beret or blue helmet.”

In 2013, the United Nations acknowledged in what appears to be a continuing problem for the U.N. worldwide its peacekeeping mission in Mali had received allegations of serious misconduct by its peacekeeping troops then in Mali, including an alleged incident of sexual abuse.

  

“The secretary-general is treating this matter with the utmost seriousness and, in line with established procedure, is in the process of notifying the troop-contributing countries,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, told a news briefing in New York on Sept. 22, 2013, in reference to the sexual abuse allegations against U.N. peacekeepers in Mali.