Atheist campaigners are planning a legal ambush to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested during his state visit to Britain over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.
Authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens argue that the pope should be arrested when he visits Britain in September and put on trial "for crimes against humanity".
The pair believe they can employ the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.
The pope will be in Britain on September 16-19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, a 19th century theologian.
The Vatican has suggested the pope is immune from prosecution because he is a head of state.
But Dawkins and Hitchens insist the pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is classed as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.
They have asked leading barrister Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to prepare a justification for legal action.
Stephens said one option for Dawkins and Hitchens was to apply to the International Criminal Court for a warrant.
Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion", has said the pope is a man whose "first instinct" when priests were found to have abused children "is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence".
Hitchens, author of "God Is Not Great", said in Monday's Guardian newspaper: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment."
But Professor Adam Roberts, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University, dismissed the bid as a "publicity stunt".
"I am not sure that they have studied carefully the relevant scripture, namely the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court," he told AFP.
"For an individual to be prosecuted for 'crimes against humanity' there would need to be strong evidence that the relevant acts were 'part of a widespread or systemic attack directed against any civilian population'.
"It is hard to imagine the ICC viewing the various sexual crimes committed by Catholic priests as crimes of the kind that the court was established to tackle."
Last year pro-Palestinian activists persuaded a British judge to issue an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the senior Israeli politician, for offences allegedly committed during the 2008-09 conflict in Gaza.
The warrant was withdrawn after Livni cancelled her planned trip to Britain.
Copyright 2010 AFP European Edition
