Basel diocese has received 183 reports of sexual assault
Published: Tuesday, Mar 5th 2024, 13:01
Updated At: Tuesday, Mar 5th 2024, 13:01
العودة إلى البث المباشر
The diocese of Basel has received 183 reports of suspected sexual assault during Bishop Felix Gmür's term of office. Half of these have been received since September 2023, after the Roman Catholic Church published a pilot study on the subject. Criminal charges have been filed in ten cases.
Of the total of 183 notifications received during Bishop Felix Gmür's 13-year term of office, 92 have been submitted since September 12, 2023, as the Diocese of Basel announced on Tuesday.
87 percent of the reports concerned offenses in the period up to the end of 2010, 13 percent since the beginning of 2011 until today. The number of reported suspected sexual offenses that occurred in the last 20 years has decreased significantly, writes the diocese. This gives confidence that the intensive prevention work of recent years is effective, it said.
In order to hear directly from those affected, the Bishops' Council met with the IG-M!kU and Groupe SAPEC organizations on 28 February.
Ten new criminal charges
Since September 2023, Bishop Felix Gmür has filed ten criminal complaints, eight of which concerned deceased accused persons. Many cases are already time-barred. One alleged sexual assault is pending with the public prosecutor's office.
The independent coordinator from a law firm in Sursee LU, who was appointed as the reporting office, has so far been granted unrestricted access to 44 personnel files, six parish files and six files of affected persons at the diocese in Solothurn. Further inspections are planned.
Boys as victims, men as perpetrators
Of the 92 new reports received, 58 concerned alleged sexual acts with children, 56 of which had already occurred in the 20th century. Twenty incidents involved the touching of naked or clothed body parts, eleven reports concerned sexually motivated comments and gestures, and five involved oral/anal or sexual intercourse. The majority of those affected were boys and boys under the age of 18, and most of the alleged perpetrators were male adults.
32 accused persons were working as secular priests or deacons at the time of the alleged offense, 13 belonged to a religious order. The remaining persons had held another function or were unknown.
Many of the accused deceased
Of the 92 reports, 78 could no longer be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations. More than half of the accused persons were already deceased at the time of the report, according to the diocese.
For the 91 reports received before September 2023, compensation was paid in 29 cases. Eight applications for compensation were submitted for the new cases and three canonical preliminary investigations were commissioned. These are now being examined by the national "Commission for Compensation for Victims of Statute-barred Assaults in the Ecclesiastical Environment".
Ten cantons belong to the diocese of Basel of the Roman Catholic Church: AG, BE, BL, BS, JU, LU, TG, SH, SO and ZG. With around one million faithful, it is the largest diocese in Switzerland.
©كيستون/إسدا
Arabic 
English 
German 
French 
Spanish