Sue the Pope!

This claim could be challenged successfully in the UK if the Pope is served with a writ when he visits there in September. Unlike overly deferential American judges, British courts do not accept the executive’s word on who gets immunity. Had General Pinochet gone to New York instead of London, the White House would have stopped his extradition proceedings immediately rather than allowed him to be detained for 18 months while the courts determined that as a former Head of State he could not claim immunity from torture charges.

In any event, Head of State immunity provides no protection in the International Criminal Court (hence its current indictment of President Bashir). The ICC Statute defines a crime against humanity to include rape and sexual slavery and other similarly inhumane acts causing serious harm to mental or physical health committed against civilians on a widespread or systematic scale if condoned or tolerated by a government or a de facto authority. The UN Appeal Court in Sierra Leone has held that recruitment of children as soldiers or sex slaves for an army amounts to a crime against humanity.

If acts of sexual abuse by priests are not isolated or sporadic events but part of a wide practice both known to and unpunished by their de facto authority—i.e. the Catholic Church—then under the command responsibility principle of international law (laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court) the commander can be held criminally liable. He falls within the temporal jurisdiction of the ICC so long as that abusive practice and the policy to tolerate it continued after July 2002, when the Court was established.