Child protection standards in both Ireland
and the Vatican have been strongly criticized by a hard hitting new
Amnesty International report.
The 400
page report, titled "Amnesty International Report 2011: The State of the
World’s Human Rights" closely examines human rights in 157 countries
and for the first time it includes the Holy See.
In
Ireland, the report claims, "child protection standards were inadequate
in both law and practice" and in Rome "the Holy See did not
sufficiently comply with its international obligations relating to the
protection of children."
Amnesty claimed
the Irish Government "failed to implement a number of commitments that
it made in 2009 following the report of the Commission to Inquire into
Child Abuse. This included a failure to introduce draft legislation to
give child protection guidelines a statutory basis.”
The
report, which was quoted in the Irish Times, said that "in February
2010, the all-party Oireachtas (National Parliament) Joint Committee on
the Constitutional Amendment on Children proposed a new constitutional
provision on children’s rights. However, the Government did not schedule
the required referendum in 2010 as promised."
The
report added that "there were serious concerns about the lack of
adequate investigation and transparent reporting by the Health Service
Executive on deaths of children in State child protection services."
Concerning
the Vatican, the Amnesty report said that "in May, 2010, the Holy See
submitted its initial reports on the optional protocols to the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child which, at the end of the year, had
yet to be considered by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child."
The
report also noted that "by the year’s end, the Holy See had again
failed to submit its second periodic report on the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child, due in 1997, and the initial report on the UN
Convention against Torture, due in 2003."
Amnesty
found there was "increasing evidence of widespread child sexual abuse
committed by members of the clergy over the past decades, and the
enduring failure of the Catholic Church to address these crimes
properly, continued to emerge in various countries."
The
failures listed in the report "included not removing alleged
perpetrators from their posts pending proper investigations, not
co-operating with judicial authorities to bring them to justice and not
ensuring proper reparation to victims."