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The Pope Can?t Be Sued Abroad . . . Is That a Good Thing?

By Ashby Jones

In an LA Times article from Sunday, UCLA law professors Kal Raustiala and Lara Stemple weigh in on a fascinating question: Can the pope be sued in U.S. courts?

Raustiala and Stemple ask the question in light of a statement made last week by Giuseppe dalla Torre, a top Vatican legal advisor, who answered the question in a decisive “no,” that Pope Benedict XVI could not be sued in an American court. “The pope is certainly a head of state, who has the same juridical status as all heads of state,” Dalla Torre said. Heads of state have broad immunity from suits in foreign courts.

But Raustiala and Stemple push a little further on this. Is the spiritual leader of the world’s Roman Catholics really a “head of state?” they ask.

That the church’s governing body — the Holy See — is often treated as a state is “deeply troubling” to the authors. Raustiala and Stemple claim the Catholic Church isn’t truly a sovereign nation. And this isn’t right, they assert: “The church’s claim to statehood gives it even more political influence than it would otherwise wield and grants outsized power to only one of the world’s many religions.”

In the late 1920s, the authors explain, Vatican City was created to give the Holy See a territorial home and protect its independence. Today, nearly every country maintains diplomatic ties with the Vatican, and the Holy See is a “permanent observer state” at the U.N. This persists despite its lack of most of the key legal characteristics of statehood. The Vatican doesn’t possess the territory, the population, or the government to justify nationhood, write the authors.

And this, they assert, is a bad thing; bad for “women’s equality, gay rights and reproductive freedom.” Now, continue Raustiala and Stemple, “the unfolding sexual abuse scandal reveals another dark side of the Holy See’s claim to statehood: the extraordinary immunities claimed by the pope in the face of conspiracy accusations that span the globe.”

At the end of the piece, the authors point to an anecdote involving Pope John Paul II and Vladimir Putin:

When Vladimir Putin visited Vatican City some years ago, he offered to invite the pope to Russia. Russian Orthodox leaders opposed the pontiff’s visit, seeing it as an encroachment by Rome on their turf. Putin proposed a solution. As Putin later recalled, he told the pope: “I am ready to invite you as the head of state. I, as the head of state, invite you as the head of state.” The pope replied, “Look out the window. What kind of state do I have here? You can see my whole state right from this window.”

LBers, any thoughts on this?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 12, 2010 (boomark / email).