AUSTRALIA
The Age
Chris Vedelago Cameron Houston
The Catholic Church has pledged to double potential compensation payments for child sex abuse survivors to $150,000 but has back-tracked on a promise to publicly release an independent review into its controversial Melbourne response victim compensation scheme.
The decision is expected to upset survivors, their families and victims advocates who have been waiting for more than a year for Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart to authorise the release of the report, some of whom contributed to its creation.
In 2014, retired Federal Court judge Donnell Ryan was commissioned to examine the operation of the Melbourne Response program following complaints about its fairness.
The report was handed more than a year ago to Archbishop Hart, who had pledged to release its findings.
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.