GENEVA
NBC News
By Alexander Smith, NBC News contributor
The Vatican came under blistering criticism from a United Nations committee Thursday over allegations it protected pedophile priests at the expense of victims in what constituted a worldwide sex abuse scandal.
The U.N. committee’s main human rights investigator, Sara Oviedo, led the most intense grilling the Holy See has received on the issue, according to a report by The Associated Press.
Given the “zero tolerance” policy of the Vatican, she asked, why were there “efforts to cover up and obscure these types of cases?”
According to the AP, another committee member, psychologist Maria Rita Parsi, added: “If these events continue to be hidden and covered up, to what extent will children be affected?”
The U.N. committee in Geneva, Switzerland, was pressing the Holy See about its failure to provide reports for almost two decades on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which it ratified in 1990.
The Vatican insists it is not responsible for the actions of priests, who it says are not its employees but citizens of their own countries.
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