AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 12 March 2014)
Cardinal George Pell’s legal team privately told his office that they had succeeded in defeating a church victim (former altar boy John Ellis) and that this victory (known as the “Ellis Defence”) could successfully block other church victims in the future, according to a document tabled at a public hearing of Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission in March 2014.
This document, written in 2007, was a briefing note written by a legal firm acting for the Sydney Catholic archdiocese. In 2006 and 2007, Mr Ellis had been seeking to sue Cardinal Pell and the trustees of the Sydney archdiocese in the New South Wales Supreme Court for the damage done to Mr Ellis’s life by the action of the Sydney archdiocese in giving an abusive priest (Father Aidan Duggan) easy access to children. The NSW Court of Appeal blocked Mr Ellis from proceeding any further with this action.
In their confidential briefing in 2007, sent privately to Cardinal Pell’s private secretary (Mr Michael Casey), the Sydney archdiocese’s legal firm said that the court’s ruling effectively found that “the church is an unincorporated association which cannot … be sued”.
The court’s decision “marks a conclusive victory for the archdiocese”, they wrote, and “places a number of significant obstacles that will need to be addressed by any claimant seeking to resolve claims litigiously”.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.