Concerns Raised over Delays in Extraditing Catholic Priest Accused of Abuse
By Thomas Oriti
A man who says he was abused by an Australian Catholic priest has expressed concerns about perceived delays in the investigation. The abuse is said to have been committed in the UK, and the Crown Office there had announced plans to extradite the man from Sydney more than a year ago. The man making the allegations, Hugh Kennedy who lives in UK, has questioned why Father Denis Alexander remains in Australia. "You need to get ready for the long haul because nothing really happens," he said. "Information is not forthcoming and you really just don't know where, or when, or if ever, your case will come to court." The 53-year-old said he was abused by the retired priest at a Scottish Catholic Boarding school in the 1970s. Mr Alexander later returned to his native Australia, where he continued working as a priest in Sydney. A BBC documentary first raised allegations against him in 2013. While he denied the claims, they prompted the Catholic Church to strip him of his priestly faculties pending the outcome of an investigation. But three years on, Mr Kennedy is frustrated by the lack of progress in the case. "If Denis Alexander has nothing to fear, and has no problems with coming and facing me in a court of law, then I see no reason why he shouldn't just want to come back and address this matter at his earliest possible convenience," he said. 'Hiding a dark secret' The accusations levelled against Mr Alexander were just one part of the BBC's investigation into the Fort Augustus Abbey School in the Scottish Highlands — a Catholic boarding school run by Benedictine monks. The investigations correspondent with the BBC in Scotland, Mark Daly, said the work exposed a dark chapter in the prestigious school's history. "People from Glasgow or from Edinburgh who had a strong faith, that'd be the Catholic school that they would want to send their children to," he said. "But when we started looking into it, what we found was that this Abbey was really hiding a dark secret, and that secret was five decades of physical and sexual child abuse." The School has since closed. But Daly said justice for survivors had been slow. "We do have an inquiry here in Scotland, into general abuse in residential care," he said. "There is a wider inquiry going on in the rest of the UK into child sex abuse institutionally. But both of these inquiries have been beset with problems. "The UK abuse inquiry is into its fourth chair, they both appear to be beset with organisational issues, and survivors have spoken of their extreme frustration." In 2013, the Catholic Church in Australia said it referred the accusations against Mr Alexander to New South Wales Police. Two years later, in December 2015, the UK Crown Office announced plans to extradite the 80-year-old from Australia. But a BBC journalist recently confronted Mr Alexander at his Sydney home, where he appeared to have no knowledge of attempts to extradite him. MP urges response It has become a sensitive issue for the Federal Member for Whitlam in New South Wales, Labor's Stephen Jones. When he was a student in the 1980s, a number of children were abused at his school in Wollongong. And he has now written to the Federal Attorney-General asking for an update on Mr Alexander's case. "To me and many fair-thinking Australians, it beggars belief that we have a three-year Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia, and we are leaving no stone unturned here in Australia, and yet we don't appear to be co-operating in a timely manner to have people who are alleged to have committed similar offences in other countries brought to justice," Mr Jones said. New South Wales Police referred the ABC to the Attorney-General. A spokesperson for the Attorney-General's Department said the Australian Government did not disclose if it had received an extradition request from a foreign country, until the person was arrested or brought before the courts. Mr Kennedy wonders whether a case will ever proceed. "It's now down to Australia's jurisdiction to decide whether or not they see it as something that they are prepared to do," he said. "And the time scale for this, I have no idea, been given no time whatsoever to expect whether or not Mr Alexander will be extradited. "In fact, the British system now can admonish itself of all blame, because they're now putting this in the hands of the Australian authorities."
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