Vatican faces UN grilling on child sex abuse

The Vatican is gearing up for a bruising showdown over the global priest sex abuse scandal, forced for the first time to defend itself at length and in public against allegations it enabled the rape of thousands of children by protecting paedophile priests and its own reputation at the expense of victims.

The Holy See will today be grilled by a UN committee in Geneva on its implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Among other things, the treaty calls for signatories to take all appropriate measures to protect children from harm and put child-ren’s interests above all else.

The Holy See ratified the convention in 1990 and submitted a first implementation report in 1994. However, it did not provide progress reports for nearly a decade, and only submitted one in 2012 after coming under criticism following the 2010 explosion of child sex abuse cases in Europe and beyond.