UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph
By David Barrett, and Matthew Holehouse
09 Jul 2014
Baroness Butler-Sloss, the former judge appointed to investigate allegations of an establishment cover-up of child sex abuse, was forced to issue an apology after making crucial errors in a previous inquiry into two paedophile priests, The Telegraph can disclose.
The peer was put in charge of a “flawed” investigation into how the Church of England handled the cases of two ministers in Sussex who had sexually abused boys.
Eight months after her report was published Lady Butler-Sloss had to issue a six-page addendum in which she apologised for “inaccuracies” which, she admitted, arose from her failure to corroborate information which was given to her by senior Anglican figures as part of the inquiry.
Critics said it was further evidence that Lady-Butler-Sloss was the wrong person to lead the new Home Office inquiry into a range of institutions, including the Church.
The 2011 report looked at the Church’s handling of information about Roy Cotton, a parish priest in the Diocese of Chichester who died in 2006, and Colin Pritchard, another Anglican minister in the diocese who attended theological college with Cotton in the 1960s.
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