One of the defendants within the Vatican’s big financial trial has formally complained to the United Nations that Pope Francis violated his human rights by authorizing wide-ranging surveillance through the investigation.
A lawyer for Raffaele Mincione, a London-based financier, submitted a grievance last week to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights via a special procedure that permits individuals or groups to offer the U.N. with details about alleged rights violations in countries or institutions.
The filing marks the most recent and highest-profile grievance in regards to the Vatican trial, highlighting the peculiarity of the Vatican’s criminal justice system and its seeming incompatibility with European and democratic norms. The Vatican is an absolute monarchy where the pope wields supreme legislative, executive and judicial power.
The trial, which opened in 2021 and resulted in December, focused on the Holy See’s money-losing 350 million euro investment in a London property but additionally included other tangents. Vatican prosecutors alleged brokers and Vatican officials fleeced the Holy See of tens of hundreds of thousands of euros in fees and commissions, after which extorted the Holy See for 15 million euros ($16.5 million) to cede control of the property.
The trial resulted in December with convictions for nine of the ten defendants, including Mincione and a once-powerful cardinal, Angelo Becciu. The court’s motivations for the sentence still have not been published, but each Vatican prosecutors and the nine convicted defendants have announced appeals.
Mincione’s grievance to the U.N. focused on the role of the pope through the investigation, an area that was flagged as problematic by defense lawyers through the trial and external experts in its aftermath.
The grievance cited 4 secret executive decrees Francis signed in 2019 and 2020 that gave Vatican prosecutors wide-ranging powers to research, including via unchecked wiretapping and to deviate from existing laws. The decrees only got here to light right before trial, were never officially published, provided no rationale or timeframe for the surveillance, or oversight of the wiretapping by an independent judge.
The chief prosecutor argued Francis’ decrees provided unspecified “guarantees” for the suspects, and the judges rejected the defense motions on the time that argued they violated the elemental right to a good trial. In a somewhat convoluted decision, the judges ruled that no violation of the principle of legality had occurred since Francis had made the laws.
Mincione’s grievance also alleged the tribunal will not be independent or impartial, a claim the Vatican has rejected previously. Francis can hire and fire judges and prosecutors, and recently decided such things comparable to their compensation, pension and term limits.
It will not be clear what, if anything, the U.N. will do with the grievance. The Geneva-based office fields special rapporteurs, or experts, to observe specific areas of human rights, including the judiciary and independence of judges and lawyers.
Previous complaints to the U.N. human rights office in regards to the Vatican or Catholic Church, within the areas of kid sexual abuse and LGBTQ+ discrimination, resulted in letters from the U.N. special rapporteur to the Vatican’s U.N. ambassador in Geneva listing problems and requesting responses and changes.
Mincione has also tried to have interaction the Council of Europe on the matter, given the Holy See is subject to periodic review as a part of the COE’s Moneyval process to protect against money laundering. In January, a British representative asked if the COE would look into the Vatican’s human rights situation given the trial end result.
The plenary assembly chairman dodged the query.
In ongoing litigation, Mincione has also sued the Vatican secretariat of state in a British court over the reputational harm he says he suffered because of this of the Vatican trial.
