The investment manager Raffaele Mincione, who is at the centre of the London property scandal and the trial against him at the Vatican, has formally lodged a complaint with the United Nations.
According to media reports, Mincione claims that he has been denied his rights in the ongoing trial against the Vatican.
Mincione also criticises alleged procedural violations during the more than three-year investigation.
The Italian worked as an investment manager for the Vatican Secretariat of State from 2014 to 2018.
According to the internet portal "The Pillar", the complaint to the Office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers also contains a repetition of earlier legal criticism of the search warrants authorised by Pope Francis in 2019, with which the investigations were conducted.
These included four executive acts, known as rescripts, which authorised the electronic surveillance of certain suspects by the gendarmerie corps for a limited but renewable period.
This was intended to ensure the protection of the results of the investigation.
Mincione was one of ten defendants on trial for financial offences, including Cardinal Angelo Becciu, a former close advisor to Pope Francis. The Vatican had accused Mincione of inflating the price of a £124 million investment in a former warehouse in Chelsea through a fund he managed. Nine of the defendants were convicted.
Although Mincione had been charged by Vatican prosecutors with a range of financial offences, including embezzlement, fraud, abuse of office and money laundering, he was acquitted on almost all charges.
However, he was found guilty of having "unlawfully used" 200 million US dollars from the Vatican Secretariat of State, according to media reports.
According to Vatican law, the money was not available for investment, which is why the court ruled that it was embezzlement and money laundering. Mincione is said to have made a profit as an asset manager.
Criticism of the Vatican justice system
As the portal "The Pillar" reports, Mincione maintained his innocence throughout the proceedings and said in an interview with the portal that he was being made the scapegoat for an internal Vatican corruption scandal.
The property had been valued by independent experts. He also criticised the Vatican for not providing evidence of its misconduct - a point echoed by British lawyer Rodney Dixon, who submitted the complaint to the UN Special Rapporteur on Mincione's behalf.
Dixon, a leading human rights lawyer, criticised the Vatican City's judicial system for its lack of independence and the inability of the defence to gain access to all possible exculpatory evidence. Among other things, Dixon described the Pope as a "perpetrator" of human rights violations, as he had personally "authorised the illegal tapping of Mincione's phone".
The Vatican emphasised to the British newspaper "Telegraph" that it had acted appropriately and in accordance with the law.
The Vatican spokesman said that the legality of the investigation and the compliance of the Vatican justice system with the principles of a fair trial "have been recognised by various foreign courts".
One of the defendants, Cardinal Angelo Becciu (75), was sentenced to five and a half years in prison by a Vatican criminal court on 16 December 2023 for several serious financial crimes against the Vatican.
At the time, the sum of 200,000 million US dollars represented around a third of the total assets of the Vatican Secretariat of State. Nevertheless, Becciu had not checked whether the conditions for such an investment were even met.
Becciu was not guilty of the other fraudulent activities in connection with this investment.
Those involved were sentenced to several years in prison.