Vatican Calls For Action Against Prostitution

Papal Representative Addresses Conference on Criminality

VATICAN CITY, APR 12 (ZENIT.org).- The Vatican called on the international community to intervene against prostitution and other exploitation of women, children, and illegal finmigrants. This appeal was made by Archbishop Dominique Rezeau, Vatican Permanent Observer at the U.N. in Vienna, when he addressed the I Oth U.N. Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Criminals, which was held in the Austrian capital from April 10- 1 7.

Archbishop Rezeau acknowledged that, in order to address the challenge of international organized crime it is necessary for individual countries and the international community to adopt effective measures at a technical and juridical level establishing preventive strategies and rigorous application of the law.

The Archbishop insisted that it is necessary to go to the root of the problem and, at the same time, be committed to “implement policies of development that have a positive effect in the prevention of crime and in the struggle against organized criminality.”

The Vatican representative invited those present to analyze “some of the social, moral and human aspects of the struggle against organized crime on a world scale,” and he recalled that, according to studies, in 1998 some 4 million women were “victims in one way or another of the international traffic in human beings.”

Archbishop Rezeau said that women, children, and illegal hynnigrants are increasingly the “object of a dirty business that reminds one of the dark times of slavery.” Therefore, the Archbishop believes that it is necessary “to fight with determination and apply the full rigor of the law on criminal organizations and individuals who control this human traffic, without neglecting the deplorable complicity that all too often they enjoy with the representatives of authority.”

If this phenomenon is going to be uprooted, the Vatican Observer in Vienna acknowledged that we must go further, as “the criminal nature of the phenomenon does not consist solely in contempt and violation of the principles of political and juridical order, but also the violation of fundamental moral values, such as the dignity and inalienable rights of the human person.” Because of this, the prevention of crime requires “educational programs geared to develop a culture of morality and legality.”

This implies a greater commitment in favor of “moral and civic education especially of youth,” a decisive challenge for nations or sectors of society “in which poverty and unemployment create a propitious terrain for the penetration of criminal organizations, which offer easy and substantial earnings through sexual trade and the traffic in drugs, arms, etc.”

According to the Vatican, if the “values of morality and legality” are not reinforced among the public and in the media and social institutions, “the agreements, declarations, and most sophisticated juridical instruments will be useless.” Without a clear conscience of what is right and wrong, “our societies will be incapable of being immune to the plague of organized crime.”

Finally, the Vatican representative made a heartfelt appeal that, in addition to punishing those responsible and those who carry out international crime, nations would feel “the duty to make available and apply, at a national and international level, programs geared to the protection and rehabilitation of victims, especially, minors and women coming from the poorest countries.”

Father Thomas Cusack