AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)
Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Thursday 20 March 2014
A lawyer accused of evading his “ethical obligation” not to mislead during a priest abuse case has told a royal commission he was working on the instructions of the Catholic church.
In a cross-examination at the child sex abuse hearing in Sydney on Thursday, commission chair Justice Peter McClellan questioned the ethical approach taken by solicitor John Dalzell.
The lawyer instructed the legal team, which disputed whether John Ellis had been abused by a priest.
The commission is looking at how the archdiocese of Sydney, led by then-archbishop George Pell, handled Ellis’s complaint that he had been abused while an altar boy by Father Aidan Duggan at Bass Hill from 1974 to 1975.
Dalzell was a senior associate with law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth when they were employed by the archdiocese to defend the Ellis case.
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