ROME - Victims of sexual abuse by priests are taking their complaints to the United Nations on Wednesday, claiming the Vatican has violated the U.N. treaty protecting children and demanding the United Nations do something about it.
Catholics for a Free Choice, which has worked for years to unseat the Vatican at the United Nations, arranged the meeting in Geneva between victims of abuse and members of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child.
The group claims the Vatican has violated the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child by failing to protect children from known abusers through negligence and inaction.
While the scandal has had its biggest impact in the United States — with floods of allegations that priests sexually abused minors and that their superiors covered-up their crimes — charges have also surfaced in Poland, Austria, Latin America and elsewhere.
Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said the global nature of the scandal made the United Nations the appropriate venue to seek action.
"We know the U.N. can do very little in the world ... It's an institution with minimal enforcement power," she told reporters Tuesday.
But she said the organization has a "moral voice and authority" that the Vatican cares about and is unlikely to ignore.
The delegation will ask the U.N. committee to press the Vatican to submit a full report on the global scope of the problem with a plan of action on how to deal with it, she said.
Kissling said if the Vatican didn't respond, she would consider asking committee members in the future to censure the Holy See — a tactic used in the U.N. Human Rights Commission for countries like Cuba and China.
The committee itself has no power to enact any other sanctions or enforce its decisions.
Calls to the Vatican spokesman seeking comment weren't returned Tuesday.
The delegation meeting with the committee includes Kissling, canon lawyers as well as victims Mark Furnish, who says he was molested by a priest in Rochester, New York when he was 12; and Jose Barba-Martin, 65, of Jalisco, Mexico, who says he was abused in a church institution in Rome in the 1950s.
The meeting is occurring against the backdrop of the expected Vatican response this week to a plan adopted in June by U.S. bishops to combat sexual abuse in the clergy.
A senior Vatican official said last month the Vatican was leaning toward giving the proposals the go-ahead on an experimental basis. The plan calls for dioceses to remove all guilty priests from church work, and, in some instances, from the priesthood itself.
The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop Wilton Gregory, is expected in Rome for a regular visit this week that is expected to coincide with the release of the Vatican's response.