Probe highlights Vatican legal system’s limited protections

VATICAN CITY — A criminal investigation into a Vatican real estate investment is exposing weaknesses in the city state’s judicial system and a lack of some basic protections for those accused — highlighting the incompatibility of the Holy See’s procedures with European norms. If nothing is done, wrote Marc Odendall, “the Holy See will no longer be able to integrate itself in the system of civilized countries and will return to a universe reserved to totalitarian states.” The investigation burst into public awareness on Oct. 1, 2019, when the pope’s bodyguards raided the Vatican secretariat of state — the offices of the central government of the Holy See — and the Vatican’s financial watchdog authority, known as AIF. The Vatican prosecutor’s office denied to AP that Francis authorized the money, but acknowledged that he did join a meeting of people negotiating the final stages of the deal in which “he asked them to find a solution with the good will of all.” The prosecutors also said the deputy secretary of state, Monsignor Edgar Pena Parra, similarly wasn’t a suspect because he “was not informed” about what his subordinates were up to, though even the prosecutors’ own documentation suggests he was. And then there needs to be an accounting afterward, certainly, and an opportunity to contest things.” Kurt Martens, a canon lawyer who works in the Vatican’s other justice system for church crimes, was more blunt: “This is what you have in a banana republic.” Further complicating their defense, once a ruling is made, the accused have no recourse outside the Vatican system, since the Holy See isn’t a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows defendants to petition the European court in Strasbourg. Odendall warned the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, in November of a public relations “time bomb that risks exploding if the unacceptable situation of the Holy See’s judicial system becomes public.” It already has.