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	I Will Have the Pope Arrested, Says Atheist Academic Dawkins By Andrew John Digital Journal April 11, 2010 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/290388 The atheist academic Professor Richard Dawkins says he will mount a legal attempt to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested "for crimes against humanity." The Pope is due to visit the UK in September, and that is when Dawkins and fellow noted atheist author Christopher Hitchens plan their legal ambush. The pair have asked human-rights lawyers to produce a case for charging the Pope – formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – "over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church," says The Times (UK). "The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998." The Pope is at the centre of the biggest scandal to hit the Catholic Church, as hundreds of cases of priestly child molestation have come to light in recent years, some going back decades. Some of those in the UK who oppose his proposed visit – which could cost the British taxpayer upwards of Ј20 million, it is believed – have mounted protests, calling for the visit to be scaled down from state visit to pastoral visit, so that the Catholic Church would have to pay the bills. New controversy surrounded the Pope last week when a letter, signed by him as Joseph Ratzinger, emerged arguing that the "good of the universal church" should be put before the defrocking of a California priests with a record of child abuse. The Pope will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, and will visit London, Glasgow, and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian, who, ironically, is thought to have been gay. Dawkins (author of The God Delusion) and Hitchens (author of God is Not Great) believe Ratzinger would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity because, although his tour is categorized as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognized by the United Nations. Vatican City is a state, but in the UN it has only "permanent observer" status. "They have commissioned the barrister Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to present a justification for legal action," says The Times, which says the legal move is "for crimes against humanity." "The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court." Dawkins is quoted as saying: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence." Hitchens said: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment."
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