AUSTRALIA
Pro Bono
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has found that Cardinal George Pell and the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese repeatedly failed in their dealings with Sydney abuse victim John Ellis.
The criticism comes in a new Royal Commission Report, Report of Case Study 8: Mr John Ellis’s experience of the Towards Healing process and civil litigation.
The Report found that Cardinal Pell “did not act fairly from a Christian point of view in the conduct of the litigation against Mr Ellis”.
The Commission examined the treatment of John Ellis, a Sydney lawyer and former altar boy who was abused by Father Aidan Duggan between 1974 and 1979.
The report said Ellis spent more than a decade seeking compensation but lost the case on a technicality in 2007 when the Court of Appeal ruled the Catholic Church was not an entity that could be sued.
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