Abuse Cases in Belgium

[beige]

A while back, there was this big thing about the Belgian Police raiding offices of the Catholic Church (1) and collecting evidence for child abuse cases. At the time, I was quite impressed that for once a justice system was actually going to try and hold them accountable to the law rather than let them just deal with problems themselves - which as it turns out involves simply shipping the child rapist off to some remote dioceses where they can bugger who they like without the prying eyes of the media coming in and creating a shitstorm (2).

Now I've just read this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11252821

A Belgian court has ruled that recent raids by police investigating alleged child sex abuse by Catholic priests were illegal. The appeals court also said the documents seized in June's raids on several buildings of Belgium's Catholic Church cannot be used by prosecutors.

Apparently it was illegal because the police didn't have clear evidence that any crime had been committed. Which seems silly to me, because I would have thought that if they had clear evidence they wouldn't have to do a fucking raid to collect some. They would have just gone straight to the prosecution part of things.(3)

The Court of Appeals ruled that the surprise search—in which police held the Belgian bishop for several hours, took away cell phones, seized laptop computers, and carried off hundreds of files—had been made without clear evidence that any criminal act had been committed by representatives of the bishops’ conference or the Brussels archdiocese, or by Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the retired Archbishop of Brussels.

[Trolldor]

Oh fuck off, there was plenty of evidence.