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This is all nonsense there is nothing at all in the Lateran Treaty that requires this separation. Importantly, Bellingham now admits that this confident assertion by the Foreign Office was a mistake. Instead, he tells us that the FCO deferred to the practice of the Holy See. Vatican practice has no meaning or effect in law, and by kowtowing to it, the FCO has caused the taxpayer to fund an entirely unnecessary embassy and ambassadorial residence in Rome.
Curious bluff
The matter was raised in 2004, after the UK relinquished its luxurious villa near the Appian Way which had served as its embassy to the Holy See. It proposed to save money on rent, security, gardeners and assorted flunkies by relocating it to our embassy in Italy. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, then secretary of state to Pope John Paul II, protested that this would be a breach of the Lateran Treaty. Incredibly, the UK capitulated. It is astonishing that the FCO should have been such a pushover on this matter, conceding a claim that was wrong in law and based on a treaty to which the UK was not a party. Although the Foreign Office website claims that the embassy to the Vatican conducts a valuable dialogue on human rights, it refuses to divulge what is said. Another FoI request has been refused, on the grounds that disclosure would be likely to prejudice effective relations between the UK and the Holy See. Decoded, this probably means that exposure would cause embarrassment to the FCO perhaps by revealing that there has been no dialogue at all on such important issues as Vatican responsibility for the rape of thousands of children, or for promoting homophobia by denouncing gay people as evil, or for objecting to condom use to prevent HIV/Aids in Latin America and Africa. If there is to be such dialogue and for any western government that takes human rights seriously, there certainly should be there is no reason why it cannot go on within the concrete walls of the UK embassy to Italy. William Hague should call the Curias bluff and merge the two UK embassies in Rome. l Geoffrey Robertson, QC is the author of The Case of the Pope (Penguin Special, 5.99) Read an extended version of this piece and view the Freedom of Information correspondence at: newstatesman.com/subjects/religion
recognised that the Vatican could make no claim again to statehood until its deal with Mussolini in 1929, because until then it possessed not a square inch of land. So Bellingham is playing with words: the Lateran treaty is crucial to recognition of the Holy See as a state, and to the governments invitation to the Pope as a head of state, for the simple reason that it is the only basis on which the Holy See claims to be a state. But the Foreign Office appears unaware, either of its history or of its terms. When I made a Freedom of Information (FoI) request for documents relating to the expensive decision to keep separate UK embassies for the Vatican and for Italy, a Foreign Office official wrote:
the Lateran pact guaranteed the full sovereign independence of the Vatican City in international law . . . under the terms of this treaty, it is not possible for ambassadors to Italy to be representative simultaneously to the Holy See hence the need to maintain two separate embassies in Rome . . . under the Lateran pact it is impossible for any state to merge its embassies to Italy and the Holy See . . . they are in separate buildings . . . in accordance with the Lateran Pacts, the two ambassadors residences remain located in separate parts of Rome.
Separate powers
So when Henry Bellingham MP, a junior minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), stated in a letter to the New Statesman last week: It is not the case that Britain recognises the Vatican because of the Lateran Treaty, nor could it be, he spoke with forked tongue. The UK resumed diplomatic relations in 1914 with the Holy See as an international entity, but not as a state. It then had no territory because the Risorgimento had extinguished the papal states in 1870, and even the Italian courts have
24 | NEW STATESMAN | 20 SEPTEMBER 2010
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