NPR Boosts ICC Court Case Against Pope, Catholic Church
NPR's Sylvia Poggioli filed a one-sided report on Wednesday's All Things Considered about a left-of-center organization, along with a group purporting to represent victims of clergy sexual abuse, lobbying the International Criminal Court to investigate the top leadership of the Catholic Church, including Pope Benedict XVI, for ” crimes against humanity .” Poggioli played sound bites only from those involved with the effort, and none from anyone sympathetic with the Church. Host Melissa Block stated in her introduction that ” the International Criminal Court in The Hague has dealt with plenty of war criminals and warlords, but it may soon have a different target: the Catholic Church . The tribunal is being asked to investigate top Vatican officials over the global clerical sex abuse scandal….t he argument is that the sex offenses meet the legal definition of crimes against humanity, and should be prosecuted .” Poggioli first highlighted that ” Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly apologized for crimes committed by priests ,” but continued that “the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests, also known as SNAP, and the human rights legal advocacy Center for Constitutional Rights , say the Vatican has yet to implement a policy to crack down on abusive priests and cooperate with law enforcement. They're delivering more than 20,000 pages of documentation from all over the world to the International Criminal Court, the ICC.”
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on September 18, 2011. Filed under