The first outside legal analyses of Vatican’s ‘trial of the century’ are in, and they’re critical
Associated PressVATICAN CITY — Several prominent lawyers have published stinging academic critiques and legal opinions about the Vatican’s recently concluded “trial of the century,” highlighting violations of basic defense rights and rule of law norms that they warn could have consequences for the Holy See going forward. After the first verdicts were issued, the Vatican’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, insisted that the process had been fair, that the judges acted independently and that the trial was carried out “in full respect of the guarantees for the suspects.” Geraldina Boni, a professor of canonical and ecclesiastic law at the University of Bologna and an adviser to the Vatican’s legal office, disagreed in an article published Monday in the peer-reviewed legal journal of the University of Milan. Such an attitude, she warned, “could end up justifying any conduct and any use of sovereign power in the search at all costs for the guilty.” Even though the tribunal tried to compensate for such “unacceptable abuses,” she wrote, the anomalies were so grave as to have “invalidated the entire justice of the trial, prospecting a violation of divine law to which even the pope is subject.” Paolo Cavana, a professor of canonical and ecclesiastic law at the Vatican-affiliated LUMSA University, argued that the Holy See is beholden to European norms guaranteeing a fair trial “by an independent and impartial tribunal,” even though it technically never signed the European Convention on Human Rights. Dixon said countries should refuse to cooperate with the Vatican tribunal, and should refuse to respect its verdicts, since the trial had been “marred by substantial violations of well-established international legal obligations applicable to all criminal proceedings.” Dixon, who has served as counsel before the International Criminal Court, International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, cited the four papal decrees, the tribunal’s refusal to allow Mincione to call seven witnesses as well as prosecutors’ refusal to turn over all evidence to the defense.