Filipino seminarians to drug war victims: we remember you

The Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia. / Nickbenanh via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Melbourne, Australia, Jan 21, 2022 / 07:00 am (CNA).
In a ruling believed to be the first of its kind in Australia, a judge has found a Catholic diocese vicari… […]

Hagatna, Guam, Feb 16, 2018 / 12:29 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Guam court has dismissed part of a defamation lawsuit against Archbishop Anthony Apuron of Agana, who is facing several accusations of sexual abuse in the 1970s.

The archbishop had publicly renounced the sexual abuse charges in a 2016 statement soon after the accusations were made, saying there were “intentional lies.”

The archbishop’s accusers brought a two-part defamation case against him shortly after his 2016 statement. Guam Pacific Daily News reported that the plaintiffs were seeking $500,000 each for a total $2 million in defamation charges.

In recent decision, Superior Court Judge Michael Bordallo dismissed the slander case but will allow the libel case to stand.

“It dismissed half the suit essentially…the complaint is two-fold: it’s a defamation suit. One for libel. One for slander. The slander was dismissed so all that’s remaining is libel,” said the archbishop’s attorney, Jacque Terlaje, according to Kuam News.

The court instructed the defendant to “seek dismissal of the suit based on the affirmative defenses of qualified privilege,” Terlaje said.

“If someone accuses you of sex abuse, and in this context in a public forum… every person has the right to defend against that, to repel the allegations of abuse is the language that is used by many courts.”

Archbishop Apuron has been accused by four former alter boys of sexual molestation in the 1970s, when Apuron was a parish priest at Mount Carmel Parish in Agat. The allegations were made public in 2016.

In January 2018, the archbishop’s nephew accused him of rape around 1989 or 1990.

The archbishop Apuron continued to deny all allegations. “God is my witness: I deny all allegations of sexual abuse made against me include this one,” he said in January, according to Guam Pacific Daily News.

[…]

Geneva, Switzerland, Sep 26, 2019 / 03:30 pm (CNA).- The Chinese government is harvesting organs from religious and ethnic minorities, a human rights organization told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday. 

The China Tribunal, which calls itself an “independent, international people’s tribunal” that investigates allegations of organ harvesting in the country, is led by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC. The tribunal said they found evidence that China is continuing to forcibly collect organs from political and religious prisoners, despite saying they stopped the practice four years ago. 

“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, and that it continues today,” said Hamid Sabi, a lawyer for the China Tribunal speaking at the UN meeting. 

The tribunal estimated that “hundreds of thousands” of people have been used to harvest organs, including hearts. This constitutes crimes against humanity, said Sabi, and is equivalent to genocide.

“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” he added. 

Although organ donation and transplantation is “a scientific and social triumph,” Sadi said that China’s practice of killing the donor is a crime.

“It is the legal obligation of UN Member States and the duty of this council to address this criminal conduct,” he said. 

China has admitted in the past that it would regularly take the organs of prisoners on death row and use them in transplants, but said they stopped in January 2015. According to the China Tribunal, it is unlikely to be true. The tribunal says there has been an “explosion” of transplants in China over the last two decades, as well as an increase of “transplant tourists” who travel to China to purchase an organ. 

These numbers “suggest a larger supply of organs than could be sourced from executed criminals alone,” says the China Tribunal’s website. This data, coupled with reports from prisoners, leads the Tribunal to conclude that “prisoners of conscience,” who have been detained for no reason other than their faith or ethnic group, are being killed in order to supply organs for the country’s organ trafficking industry. 

Groups detained en masse in China include Uighur Muslims, Tibetans, practitioners of Falun Gong, and people who worship at underground “home churches” that are not recognized by the government. 

On Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan spoke at the UN General Assembly, and demanded an investigation into the alleged human rights abuses in the province of Xinjiang. Xinjiang is home to most of the country’s Uighur population. 

“The UN must seek the immediate unhindered, and unmonitored access to Xinjiang for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,” said Sullivan. “The United Nations, including its member states, have a responsibility to stand up for the human rights of people everywhere, including Muslims in Xinjiang.” 

Sullivan added that it is imperative that the UN work to continue to monitor China for human rights abuses, especially “the repression of religious freedom and belief.” 

An estimated 1 million Uighurs, members of a Muslim ethnoreligious group, have been detained in re-education camps in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a region in China’s northwest that is roughly the size of Iran.

Inside the camps they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uighurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

The Chinese government has said reports on the camps by Western governments and media are unfounded, claiming they are vocational training centers and that it is combating extremism.

[…]