Gloria.TV News on the 11th of February 2014

Double Standards: Wall Street Journal’s Claudia Rosett calls the U.N. sex-abuse report against the Vatican – quote – an “assault on the Catholic Church”. She charges the U.N. for not having resolved its own festering problems of peacekeeper sex abuse, including rapes of minors. Quote: “The Vatican has spent years addressing the problem. But the U.N. hardly engages in the transparency it is now promoting.”

Covering Up U.N. Abuses: Rosett informs that the U.N. releases only generic statistics on violations committed by its personnel. Quote: “The U.N. doesn't share with the public such basic information as the names of the accused or the details of what they did to people the U.N. dispatched them to protect.” Blue berets accused of sex crimes are sent back to their home countries, where in most of cases they drop off the radar.

No Transparency: U.N. began releasing numbers of sex-abuse only in 2007. Since then it reported more than 600 allegations, with 354 substantiated—many of them involving minors. Rosett believes this understates the realities, given the hurdles to victims living often in societies in tumult.

U.N. Agenda: Hypocrisy is just one of the problems with the U.N. report, which assails the Holy See also for not subordinating itself to the U.N. agenda. The report calls for the Vatican to drop its opposition to adolescent abortion and contraception, condone under-age homosexuality, and to disseminate U.N. policies that run counter to those of the Church.

The U.N. Committee reports do not follow uniform standards nor do they direct urgent attention to some of the world's most horrifying abuses of children. An example: Iran has for years led the world in juvenile executions, yet the committee last reported on Iran was in 2005. Its next report on that country is not due until 2016.

Another example is a 2002 fire at a girls’ school in Saudi Arabia when 15 girls died and dozens more were injured. The committee criticized that the school did not meet safety standards for children." Roset gives the full story: When the girls tried to escape, police drove them back into the burning building because they were not covered head-to-toe. Saudi journalists had the courage to report on this. The Committee left it out.

The committee’s most recent report on North Korea voiced concern about "severe ill-treatment" and the very low overall standard of living of children. But Roset notices that there was none of the fervor with which the committee scolded the Holy See to ensure that "all forms of violence against children, however light, are unacceptable."

Rosett concludes: “The Convention on the Rights of the Child has less to do with children than with political power plays, and a fitting reform at the Vatican would be to walk away from it.”