David QuinnSome remain ‘deaf and blind’ to Church safeguarding efforts
Just this week, the National Board for Safeguarding Children praised the Dublin archdiocese for “turning around a shocking and grievous situation” in respect of clerical sex abuse.
Dublin archdiocese had been one of the worst in the country, a fact that was well catalogued in the Murphy Report. Now it has a very robust child protection system in place. It is not alone one of the best in the Church, it is one of the best in the country.
No-one can pretend that the legacy of past child protection failures are behind the Church. In a way they never will be. They will haunt the Church forever like other crimes the Church has committed in its history.
Nonetheless the huge efforts the Church has made to ensure that what happened in the 1970s and 1980s in particular does not happen again are real and must be acknowledged.
The refusal to acknowledge these efforts is what galled Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s envoy to the United Nations prior to his leading a Vatican delegation that appeared before the UN Committee against Torture last week.
He told the Boston Globe that some people were “deaf and blind” to what the Church has done to upgrade its child protection system. ‘Too late in the day’, say the critics. And that is true. It is also true that some parts of the Church are ahead of others in this regard.
Great steps forward
But what is undoubtedly true as well is that on the whole the Church has made vast steps forward.
This was not acknowledged by the UN Committee Against Torture, or the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child which the Vatican appeared before some months ago and was sharply criticised by.
Ireland has also appeared before the UN Committee Against Torture. The committee has criticised our abortion law. It has also attacked us over the Magdalen Laundries.
The committee asked us “whether adequate guidelines exist in the State party for medical and other professionals on criteria to be met for legal termination of pregnancies. Whether adequate procedures exist to challenge differing medical opinions, and whether adequate services for carrying out abortions exist in the State party.”
Mark Kelly of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, reacting to the UN report, said: “Today, the UN’s top anti-torture experts have added to an international consensus that the Government must act to end the degrading treatment of women seeking safe and legal abortions.”
We need to go back a step or two here before proceeding. We need to ask ourselves, what are these UN committees and what are the conventions and treaties they hold us accountable to?
The treaties and conventions are, for the most part, laudatory. The UN Convention Against Torture is a good example.
Other conventions
Ireland, like many other countries is a signatory to this and other conventions. So is the Holy See. As a signatory we are obliged to appear before the relevant UN committee periodically to give an account of how well we are implementing this or that convention. Herein lies the rub. Those committees are almost invariably made up of activists and radicals who interpret the various treaties and conventions in ways that suit them.
Take the aforementioned Convention Against Torture as an example. It defines torture as essentially any act which inflicts pain upon someone for the purposes of extracting information from them.
By this reckoning how is our law against abortion a form of ‘torture’? A law restricting abortion is not intended to inflict pain on anyone for the purposes of extracting information.
It is also hard to see how the regime that existed in the Magdalen Laundries falls under this heading. It would make much more sense for this to be dealt with by the UN Human Rights Committee.
Likewise it is hard to see how the child protection issue falls within the remit of the Committee Against Torture. The Committee on the Rights of the Child for sure, but not the Committee Against Torture.
Mission creep
So what we see is a form of mission creep taking place. UN committees are finding ways to exceed their remit.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child did the same thing when it criticised the Vatican over the Church’s stance on abortion. The Vatican could have responded that the destruction of a foetus in the womb is itself a form of child abuse.
But if the various UN committees can be accused of mission creep, they can also be accused of double standards.
For example, why hasn’t it hauled other branches of the UN before its various committees? UN peacekeeping soldiers in various parts of the world have been implicated in sex abuse scandals and no-one has ever been held accountable.
Neil MacFarquhar, writing in The New York Times, said the UN needs to “focus serious attention on addressing sexual crimes” by those involved in peacekeeping missions.
He wrote: “But the question that diplomats, advocates and even some officials ask is why the efforts still lag in terms of investigating accusations and, making sure those who send troops and contractors abroad hold them accountable”. Why indeed?
We might equally ask why Ireland was singled out to explain and defend its law on abortion. Why aren’t countries with very liberal abortion laws put on the spot? Is it because the various UN committees are pro-choice even though not a single UN convention justifies abortion?
And why single out Ireland over its Magdalen Laundries? Many countries had similar institutions.
So what we see, in fact, are ideologically loaded UN committees which pick and choose issues that suit their ideological agendas.
In the end, this will destroy the credibility of those same committees, but not before we call them out on their bias and double standards.