By GEOFFREY ROBERTSON - NEW STATESMAN
Added: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:32:13 UTC

Thanks to LWS for the link
At Westminster Hall in London, on the very spot where England's last absolute monarch was convicted of torture and tyranny, the world's most absolute dictator presumes to lecture our present leaders on the sins of the democratic society that has evolved in the centuries since the overthrow of Charles I. We are paying for this privilege, because the monarch of the Holy See is here on a state visit from 16-19 September. But the Holy See is a "Santa Claus" state - no matter how many believe in it, it does not exist.

The Vatican, as any tourist can tell, is not a state at all: it is a palace, surrounded by gardens, about the size of a large golf course. In law (the 1933 Montevideo Convention), a state must have a people - and there are no Vaticanians. In this Roman enclave of celibates, no citizen is born other than by accident. It has no "territory" - another statehood requirement - other than the 108 acres conveyed inviolably to it by Mussolini in 1929 as part of a sordid deal with the pro-fascist Pius XI to destroy democracy in Italy. This is described as the "Lateran Treaty" although it is not, as a matter of law, a treaty (an agreement between sovereign states) at all. It is a deal between Italy and its Church, and obviously has no legal effect on the UK, which has never been a party to it. Nonetheless, it is on this dubious document that the Vatican today pins its claim to statehood. Its most recent sovereignty statement to the United Nations reads:

"The Holy See exercises its sovereignty over the territory of the Vatican City State, established in 1929 to ensure the Holy See's absolute and evident independence and sovereignty for the accomplishment of its worldwide mission, including all actions relating to international relations, cf: Lateran treaty, preamble and articles 2-3."

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 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.
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TAGGED: LAW, VATICAN/ROMAN CATHOLICISM